Techniques for animated movement and facing

[Tom Hatfield]

I wasn't sure where to put this, so I chose the gaming forum because it's kind of gaming related, and I want to get a large turnout.

Consider the following PC games: Dungeon Master and DMII, Lands of Lore, and Stonekeep. In order for this topic to have any relevance whatsoever, you must have seen all four of these games in action, so you have an idea of how movement and facing (turning) works in each of them. I want your opinion on which you think is best, weighing presentation against memory consumption.

Remember: smaller memory footprint means more room for game-related stuff, like levels and monsters and items.

Dungeon Master is very basic and offers no animation for walking or turning. This would be the easiest method to implement, and it would have the smallest memory footprint.

DMII (PC) introduced one-step scaling into the movement cycle (thus giving the illusion of two steps). There was no animation for turning. This method would not be difficult to implement, and it would have no impact on the memory footprint.

Lands of Lore implemented a rapid scaling technique to give the illusion of smooth movement, and it slid the viewport aside quickly to give the illusion of smooth turning. The result looks very fake when you pay attention to it, but it can be convincing at a glance. This method would be fairly easy to implement, and it would have no effect on the memory footprint.

Stonekeep was one of two 2-D cell-based renderers to offer fully animated movement and turning (the other was Anvil of Dawn). The tradeoff is a smaller graphics set for corridors (due to the heavy memory footprint). The method itself would be considerably more difficult to implement than a scaled or faux method, but it would promise the highest level of realism.

Personally, I like the third choice (Lands of Lore) because it simplifies my work and offers better results than the lock-step DM approach, but I'm still curious to know what people honestly think. If I could, I would go with Stonekeep for presentation, and that might in fact be doable in the distant future.

[Gambit37]

I never saw Stokekeep in action, so can't comment on that, but based on your description, it sounds like they used drawn bitmaps of how things look while turning, ie, several versions of the graphics drawn at different angles?

Lands of Lore worked quite well, but I found it annoying after a while and would have preferred a more DM approach. I didn't like the DM2 half step.

So, on balance, I'd opt for traditional DM.

[Tom Hatfield]

I did forget to add one game to that list. Arcana (aka, Cardmaster) for the SNES used half-step frames for both movement and turning, which I thought was kind of slick at the time. That would also be doable. Of course, I understand plenty of people didn't like the half-step approach, so it could be optional.

The thing about half-steps in DMII is that it was effectively ignored when your party was accelerated; by removing the half-step, the game offered a visual cure as to how fast your party was moving. (It also slowed down more when someone's leg was wounded.) Single steps aren't quite as informative regarding party speed.

Stonekeep may have used some scaling for the forward/backward movement, but I seem to recall the perspective was retained, so I figure they probably used pre-rendered frames. The turning was definitely smooth, and the shadows were mapped accordingly (though difficult to notice given the first-person view).