Unit discrepancies

This is pretty much my to-do list, but with the Battlefield forums fading away into just a memory, I'm posting all this here as they affect the Protectors as well.

This will be a list of aesthetic discrepancies on units in game, which will probably be sorted out by me when I'm next actively working on WBC3. These discrepancies are things like inconsistent team colouring areas, or blatant image deformations. Things like poor animation wont be covered here, as they aren't bugs (although I'll probably sort some of those out, too).

1. Dark Elf Infantry loose some areas of their team colours during their walking animation, and reverts to their default colouring of a dull red. I have already started this one, and done a good job so far, too! Unfortunately, there is only 3 colours used on their default areas during the walking animation, whereas many shades of the team colours of used on those same areas during the other animations. As such, I am going through the frames one by one, manually editing them, getting their lost quality back. I have already done 5 complete rows (out of 8 ) and it's not exactly hard nor time consuming to do - it's just tedious.  

2. The Knight's hero looses his team colours on the top of his boots during his conversion animation. Even if this one requires manually editing, it wont take long at all since it'll be just ~16 frames to go through.

3. Gornak Elfeater's Basilisk wasn't updated to reflect the Basilisk's projectile change for WBC3, leaving his Basilisk to still have a red colouring effect when it shoots its blue projectile. This one is easy to do, as it only requires a colour changing tool. But you'll need to go through plenty of attacking frames manually to colour over the offending areas, as using a global colour change, including a palette adjustment, will affect other areas of the model.

4. The Chaos Dragon has inconsistent colouring on his horns / claws during the middle of his animations. (My bad!!!) This should be easy to fix, and probably be done after I've finished up with the Dark Elf Infantry.

5. Melkor's smaller interface images posses a striking blue background, instead of a pure black one. I did already fix this one for me, but held it off as I wanted to "circulate" the portrait to match the other titans. But I may scrap that idea and stick with just the changed background colour. If so, I'll probably upload the fixed version sometime next week.

6. It appears Scorpions have an issue, too. There are team colour pixels that don't use the teams' colour during their attack animation.

7. During one of the firing north frames with both the White and Black Mage, they become temporary engulfed in flames!   I did notice this when I was making the Blue Mage but forgot to mention it. As this one is just a single frame for both units, it'll take no time at all to fix.

8. The Stone Golem's west walking animation seems to contain an ill angled frame, which isn't even placed in the correct order. I've already made a start on this one by moving the frame to the correct position. The ill frame itself could be fixed by merging the 2 surrounding frames together to create a new frame to replace it.

9. The Wyvern's north moving animation seems a little twitchy and one frame seems partly corrupted. It should be easy enough to fix the obvious parts of the corruption, but to make the movement appear smooth in game will require a lot of trial and error.
Although the twitchy / jelly body effect is still present. I've left this as it is as it's not actually a mistake but more of a trick of the eye through the combination of the light source and the actual animation's movement. However, I'll keep an eye on this and if it plagues my mind, I'll take a more thorougher look into it and try to soften the effect.

Since I've been spending a lot of my time recently on the WBC3 wiki, I felt guilty that I've been neglecting my other WBC3 related projects. And so, I've sorted out number 6 - the Scorpion's attack animation. (Mainly because I knew it wouldn't take long.)

The updated file can be obtained from the usual place for modders, within the units section.

Added in 0.8.3. Good work!

Finally, after all these months I have completed the Dark Infantry's walking animation! It was a horribly tedious process due to the nature of the issue - palette modifications and colour changing tools wouldn't work for the situation, which left me to go through all the frames one by one and manually correct them.

For those who do not know, The Dark Infantry would loose their team colours on their gloves and top of their boots during their walking animation, reverting to a dark red (which also consisted of just 3 different colours).

Needless to say, it's been added to WBC3Stuff for modders to download, under the units section.

More Mage issues:

7. During one of the firing north frames with both the White and Black Mage, they become temporary engulfed in flames!   I did notice this when I was making the Blue Mage but forgot to mention it.

Also it appears I was last working on the Knight Hero's conversion animation. It's actually already in my game, but still requires a little more work before I can be happy with it.

Indeed the knight hero's converting animation makes his legs change color - this might be an issue with all hero avatars though.

I've just fixed the Black Mage's attack animation. It turned out that there were more offending frames than just the obvious one, so it wasn't as quick and easy as first thought.
In a couple of the frames his foot sets on fire and in one other, he looses his arms!

Regardless, it's all done and uploaded to the usual place.

White Mage done, too!

Considering that I updated his death animation some time ago, I've bundled both updated files together.

So that's number 7 crossed off the list.

I think there's also problems with the Stone Golems' left and the Wyvern's up movement animations (might've been down though, I can't quite remember   ).

I've just taken a look both in game and in the files - yeah I see what you're on about.

The Stone Golem appears to have 2 issues. Firstly, one of its frames appears to have been rendered at a slightly cocked angle to what it should have been. It's facing at an angle between West and South West, so it doesn't fit in any of the rows. Secondly, this odd frame has been placed in the wrong position.

I've already corrected the position issue as that was easy, but I'll need to create a new frame by merging the 2 surrounding ones together.

As for the Wyvern, I'm not quite sure how it ended up as it is. The offending frame looks like it may have been pasted over another Wyvern frame - a smaller one, as you can see 2 pairs of wing claws (one smaller than the other), as well as part of the team colour band being obscured and the head seems to be over / on top of the ear like things. Its body also appears to twitch in game, but the body seems fine compared to the surrounding frames. Perhaps there's also another offending frame along that row?

It appears that the Knight Hero actually only has the team colours on his boots during his idle animation. As such, it'll be easier and much quicker to remove the team colours from the boots on that lone animation set than it would be to add them to every single other animation the Knight Hero has.

Out of fear that I've queued up too many tasks, I've quickly gone and sorted out the Stone Golem's walking animation and, quite frankly, I believe I've done a bloody good job of it, too!

This encourages me further to think more about the Minotaur King's Conversion animation, something else that could do with being looked into but was dismissed under reasoning that it would be too difficult to make an entirely new frame, or more, to get it to loop correctly.

Anyway, the Stone Golem's updated walking animation can be found in the usual place.

Wyvern done, or more accurately, I've sorted out that lone mistake of a frame. However, the "jelly body" effect still remains. This is because the effect is a result of the Wyvern's actual animation, the light source and the limited 256 colours. All this makes it look very wobbly and to go through all frames is unnecessary, considering this is more of a trick of the eye than anything. But I've tinkered and improve it anyway, lessening the obviousness of it.

Gornak's done.
However, when I was going through his frames I became aware of another issue he suffers from. Half way through his south-east attack animation, the light source for his Basilisk's left eye cuts out. This isn't really noticeable and I have left it as it is for the time being. My aim this time around was to simply change the glow colour to blue from red. However, I one day may return to this and simulate a light source to finish off the sequence.

Also, if you haven't already done so, you could change his attack sound to the magic one that the other Basilisks use, as the crushing sound is actually a mistake. This was because during the early days of WBC2, Gornak never used to ride a Basilisk and instead clubbed his enemies (the Giant in WBC3 was actually the original Gornak Elfeater model). But when he was given a Basilisk to ride, his attack sound was obviously overlooked, unfortunately, like most things of this great game. Such a shame, really.

This one may qualify:

The Pterodactyl doesn't seem to be drawn in the correct position.

I'll inspect later. (Maybe tomorrow.)

Oops, I forgot about this! - I'll inspect later. (Maybe tomorrow.)

I finally remembered to look into this!
It seems to be an issue with the .ani file, not the image itself. Adjusting the Y-off-set value (and possibly the Y draw-height) should fix this. I may get this done tomorrow or failing that, this weekend.

Done - added to WBC3Stuff / Units folder. (It now flies as high as the average advanced flier.)

Just for the record, not all fliers are at the same height. Most basic fliers share a similar height, which is slightly lower than the average height used most advanced fliers. And this height used for advanced fliers is slightly lower than that of the Dragons' height.
With the Pterodactyl corrected, the Dragonfly is now the lowest flying flier in the game.

Just noticed this whilst I've been messing with the Faerie Dragon - its top-right walk animation has a spot of debris floating on it as its claw is shifted off the actual model.

Number 4 has been fixed since it now uses a different model.