Alexandermb

Lithobolos_light attacking ranged animation:

First it is only visual assets changes, i've already done with the medium artillery lithobolos, now i will have to make at least 2 big versions of lithobolos, 1 medium ballista for romans, Finish my Polybolos wich is only UV adjusment and finally make a new Scorpio. However for properly implement them whitout having a weird visual glitch like kush hero archer gattling gun, i would like to propose that gameplay change on siege (propose, not force neither commit it whitout asking any1 else) why? Because we already see a disproportional size visualization on Rome Ballista with all the lithobolos, while i've already seen enough reference of greeks having the same size of artillery so.. for more realism and immersion i vote for giving light artillery they own template, as well as medium and finally Heavy. Giving this to the main Civilizations with restrictions giving a limit of the recruitment could also help but also i try to aim for historical accuracy Visualy speaking wich is my only area. Size, Usage, Skirmishes/Ambushes or Besiege Cities. So templates could either be light, medium, heavy artillery or Boltshooter Stonethrower, Heavy_Stonethrower.

Upcoming new artillery preview: Small 2 Operator lithobololos: For those who always asked for a "Tower" Artillery, this could fit a tower (and if it doesn't tower will fit on it). Following references made this siege artillery wich is an smaller version found on a reference but not seen only one but multiple times, specially on some artistic drawings of macedonians on a river using it wich can be appreciated that isn't that big in some cases and it does in others. So the point is Split artillery in 3 Classes. Light Artillery: Oxybeles/Polybolos/Scorpion. Fast shooting light artillery, good agaisn't infantry. 1 - 2 operators. (Yes the plan for modders (not main game) could be upgrade wall towers into roofles towers for small artillery). Med Artillery: Lithobolos, Roman Ballista Medium size ideally for ambushes were the artillery is faster to move carried in a wagon as usual but with shorter range and smaller stone projectiles. 2 - 3 Operators Heavy Artillery: Roman Heavy ballista, Carthage Heavy Lithobolos, Reinforced Heavy lithobolos. Ideally for besiege towns from a long range, Expensive specially on wood, acquirable only by some factions, stronger, slower than a Ram and if its possible it should be good to have a Tech to unlock them,. 4 - 6 operators This could make artillery a 3 phase gameplay being workshop available at 2nd phase unlocking only light artillery, Med artillery and Ram at 3rd Phase and Research about some kind of education recquired by the greeks and romans of that era wich allowed them to do this possible). This is only my thought, this isn't a gameplay choice im placing above all other decisions. But thats my plan, Hopefully maybe someone add it to a mod or maybe it reaches main game. Some references i have for my plan:

All this time i was looking for a game reference of archery and horse movement, and i totally forgot about this masterpiece ive played on ps2:

After 5 Days of cleaning, animating, moving, deleting, searching, bug finding... It is done! Hopefully theres nothing much to be done later but it may be something i've missed. Clearly tweaking the whole cavalry isn't a small thing, those are thousands of actors + a lot of animations. Variants used by capes for cavalry: You can copy this variants and replace the ones in your cavalry actors in order to match the new ones whitout too much trouble. You can also use Notepad++ Search tool for replace in batch all actors whitout too much trouble like i've did, otherwise if i would have done it 1 by 1 it would had too me weeks to finish: Red: Old variant example. Blue: Replacement copying the variant. For horses this are the new variants:

Only tweaking gallop in order to get a smooth movement whitout many jumps. Horse is done. Cavalry done. Smoothening Galloping on riders for make the animation more able to handle movement combat such as firing while galloping/pacing or thrusting. Galloping animation went from Ready only to Relax/Ready state, so if we ever implement Running by double clicking again Running relaxed is for the command while running Ready is for chasing. Aspis cavalry is more supported having more animations.

With the recent fixes made possible to add longer idles on cavalry. Idle count now is 5 both on horse and rider.

Looks good but too relaxed. Attack speed should be the same on every infantry based on their kind. A longbow man will of course be slower but that means "Slower" in terms of human speed, no Faster in such way that becomes inhuman. Tweaking cavalry to find a good attack speed found that for cavalry best is repeat time 1150 for both spearman and swordsman, No need to be different. Only the attack should be different. Is like, ITS COMING, HOLD ON IN THERE, THE ATTACK IS COMING........ 2 Hours later.... "Stab" 30 damage compared to the 10 damage per second done by the cavalry swordsman.

Nope, that would have took me moooore time to only set up the collision. Probably a task for another time, at this point modders and our recent changes have to make too much changes either by naming duplication and redundancy or for fixing hide bugs.

haven't seen it however AoE always had good death animations

Objective achieved! New Cavalry death animation done!

Doesn't matter, i'll take it into account.

@Angen may want to hold the fixes to rider capes since i've replaced all of them with the same way of infantry but with new variants.

@Stan` found a solution for capes with ranged attacks: ranged variants will have to include the attacking animation in the main variant as well as using the secondary variant in order to let the main actor decide above the cape wich attacking ranged choose from, being it archer hip or back or javelinist.

After a very long variant's cleaning for all horse related actors ended with this result: Horse props such as hair or blankets now properly supports multiple variants with different movement animations and/or idles. Horse props such as trader or fauna no longer are required, neither their variants so a lot of duplicated files will be deleted. Breaking changes: Horses variants in order to work just like capes work now for infantry they require to have the id tag exactly as the prop tag ie: Where it used to be <variant name="Idle"/> now it needs to be replaced with something like this: <variant file="quadraped/base_horse_fauna.xml" name="Horse-Fauna" frequency="1"/> Here a list of the variants: As you can see, theres no longer required a "horse_swordsman" since it doesn't make any difference spearman from swordsman, so it is now related only to the walking animation Currently movement animations (Blend file have some more): Horse_Walk. (Used in trader horse) Horse_Walk_Relax. (Used in fauna horse) Horse_Trot. (Used in Cavalry horse) Horse_Pace. (Used in Champion's horse) Horse_Gallop. (Used by most of horses for running) Variants were usually placed in biped/ folder being them a children of another variant placed in biped/rider/cavalry. In order to reduce amount of files in biped/ folder and also reducing redundant names All riders variants will be moved to biped/rider/cavalry folder for have a cleaner biped/ folder. List of variants so far for melee cavalry: The main objective i had in mind was to standarize rider capes just like done with the infantry for have less annoying cape folder, but one thing led to another and i've ended fixing the initial bug we had whitout knowledge for the horse props. So for be less specific: Fixes/Changes: Horses now are able to handle more movement animations whitout duplicating props wich wasn't possible before. Less variants files for horses and riders. Less actors for horse props, less actors needed for capes. Added xml header for some variant's wich didn't had them before. Improvements: Better visual looking attacking melee animations. Better visual looking attacking ranged javelin animatios. New walking animations for horses. Stored in blender; Charge attacking spear and sword animations, Attack ranged with bow while moving.

First in movement ranged attack animation:

Now we need the function. However im not sure if the animation will work like that because the attack time is around frame 20 or 22 in a 40 lenght animation. If the function is added, there should be a new tag for choose when it should be played animation to sync the impact moment.

All melee new attacking animations are done.

Playing around with the time i have been animating and looking for a smoother animations got this 3 for cavalry attacking: Frame lenght are 40 for the 3 animations. Doing cavalry attacking animations is quite hard because every reference is a combat in movemente, there is not a lot of stationary figthing animations like it is in RTS games like AoE, Empire Earth, Even Warcraft 3 Reforged but they went too lazy with cavalry and only added 1 attacking animation. At least this have more movement for a battlefield showing a more scared or lets call it a more reaction-like horse compared to the actual attacking wich is good in some animations and bad in others. Note; Spear is just for reference, two handed attacking animations haven't been done yet.

Umh, maybe deleting the whole event but i guess that would also get them unsync. Why this only applies with this actor in particular and not with every single prop we have sync? like horse peytrals, hair, Even bows should play double sound. Something is different. If issue persist, actor or variants should have another Tag for Sound or disable anything that could cause an issue if duplicated. @The Undying Nephalim Can i have a look at the actor xml files please? only the actors, (if the whole item with template are included of ccourse it will help but i just want to have a look at the actor and see what is different from any other synced actors).

In order to have some material done, First charge attacking with spear:

Do they have the same starting frame, frame lenght and FPS (24 or 30)? If that so they should be sync deleting event but all of them shouldn't have event so maybe placing the event on an empty prop whitout animation. Haven't faced this problem yet but sounds like an issue in a future for other actors.

Well, im actually ignorant on the variants too because i just move a bit the variants until i found the proper order and naming tag to match with the actors in atlas. for example in this case: First when i've updated the actors in the 2nd horse update all mane and tails were unsyc because the movement of the cavalry was overwritting the trader movement. This first happend because of the base_horse_mount variant using "walk" tag so trader horse variant was using is own "walk" animation too but also being a children of horse mount so MountVariant > TraderVariant overwrited. So i've removed the horse mount movement animation and placed it on each variant making also the "fast" using pace animation instead of troting. This means that we can't make X variant have a different movement animation being X a children of Y wich also has a movement animation. So X doesn't overwrite Y, X isn't being taken into account. So we can make a guide for variant makings following this order: X: Generic animations that doesn't require to be different. IE: Death. Idles if they are generic. Y: Specific Animations that are different per actor IE: Walk, Attack, Idles if they are like new infantry idles. Second problem was my variants being separated by a group each one of them: Before: After:

Adjusting the actors and props found why i had to do trader hair separated from cavalry hair at first place, and found a solution so now we will have less actors needed for horses and will be possible to have different movement animations whitout duplicating props.

Actually thats the one handed spear animation, the 2H one is this: And the variants: