V 2.0 Animation improvement.
rashkae
Member Posts: 179
I don't think I've seen any thread here so far praising Beamdog for the amazeballs job they did on the animation engine. When I saw the marketing preview videos of SoD, I was a little worried. There were all these new fog effects filling the entire screen, sprite hightlights, health bars, etc. Since I have long since given up my gaming video card, I figured the game would probably not run well on my pc without an upgrade.
My worries were completely unfounded. Not only does SoD run beautifully on my wimpy passive cooled video, it runs better than ever. I think I saw somewhere in the release notes a footnote about animation speed being normalized to movement speed. I'm not sure what all that entails, but I *love* the result. Everything in BG looks and runs perfectly smooth, with no stuttering that used to happen in busy areas. But I can see a high level of polish everywhere anything is animated. Even in the inventory screen. If you pick up an item, the icon picture follows your mouse cursor. (This is different from previous game, where the mouse cursor itself was changed to the item icon.) But the item icon doesn't just move with your mouse.. if you move the mouse around a bit, you'll see it accelerates/decelerates smoothly. That's a nice touch. I don't think I've ever seen a sprite based game with this level of polish to the screen refresh and animation frames.
I know Beamdog won't comment on what they have in the skunkworks, but surely there's a bigger plan for this re-inventing old tech than refreshing BG.
My worries were completely unfounded. Not only does SoD run beautifully on my wimpy passive cooled video, it runs better than ever. I think I saw somewhere in the release notes a footnote about animation speed being normalized to movement speed. I'm not sure what all that entails, but I *love* the result. Everything in BG looks and runs perfectly smooth, with no stuttering that used to happen in busy areas. But I can see a high level of polish everywhere anything is animated. Even in the inventory screen. If you pick up an item, the icon picture follows your mouse cursor. (This is different from previous game, where the mouse cursor itself was changed to the item icon.) But the item icon doesn't just move with your mouse.. if you move the mouse around a bit, you'll see it accelerates/decelerates smoothly. That's a nice touch. I don't think I've ever seen a sprite based game with this level of polish to the screen refresh and animation frames.
I know Beamdog won't comment on what they have in the skunkworks, but surely there's a bigger plan for this re-inventing old tech than refreshing BG.
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