Xfing wrote:Hey!
Since you've already managed to convince Gifty to let you use his smooth animations, what do you think you could convince him to let you use the remaining ones that you still don't have?
Gifty is perfectly OK with it. But incorporating even already existing animations is a whole lot of work.
First, I have to rename sprites because we use very different naming conventions and otherwise it'd be pretty confusing with me to work with. (Also to make sure the new names don't overlap with the existing ones.)
Second, in both mods monsters' definitions are riddled with custom functions, so I can't just copy the animation definition from his code; I have to redefine it in my code frame by frame manually, checking the lengths, incorporating my features, etc. Pretty exhausting.
Third, I also have to double-check with the original Doom actors, making sure the timings and other things are correct and don't violate vanilla rules (not everything is perfectly vanilla in Smooth Doom in that respect).
Fourth, I can't say I like all of Smooth Doom animations. For example, the Chaingunner death animations where he falls on his face looks pretty horrible and I'm not planning to use it at all. On the other hand, I have some other animations that Smooth Doom doesn't have and I don't want to go overboard, you know, making more content just for the sake of making more content.
So, in short, I introduced only those animations that I either liked or they weren't a ton of work to introduce. It's quite likely I'll add more in the future, it's just not the highest priority, to be honest.
As for Hell Knight's SD gibbing animation being a regular death in BD, you're not quite right. In short, the gib deaths from SD actually ARE gib deaths in BD, they're just easier to trigger. Let me explain with a wall of text.
I've always been kinda reluctant to include gibbing for big demons because it's always been sort of a convention in Doom that big demons don't gib. (Only small zombies do; supposedly because bigger demons have sturdier bodies that don't shatter as easily as zombie flesh, I guess?) And I kinda wasn't into the idea of breaking that convention. There's also a technical limitation: in Doom in order to trigger a gibbing animation you have to deal so much damage to a monster that his health have to become the negative number equal to his total health: so a Zombieman has 20 health and to be gibbed it has to become -20 in one single attack. Hell Knight, for example, has 500 health, and even if he's at 1 health when you attack him, you'd have to deal a whopping
501 damage to gib him, and there are simply no attacks like[ that in Doom.
Now, of course I have control over how much damage you need to deal to gib a monster and indeed I tweaked that a bit: for example, ChaingunGuy's gib health is -50 (vs -70 in vanilla Doom) so he's a big easier to gib, but this is a relatively small change. But if I wanted to make Hell Knight gibbable, I'd have to come up with an amount that would trigger that. But I don't think there are any attacks that deal over 128 damage in a single shot in Doom, and it seems just weird to me that such a tough monster as Hell Knight would have gib health of -100 (plus even with -100 in actual practice it would be impossible to gib him). To me it just doesn't make a lot of sense
conceptually.
It was actually this line of thinking that made me introduce an intermediary type of death for some monsters, a
Dismemberment death. For zombies that would mean having 3 deaths: regular, dismemberment (usually losing head and arm) and full gibbing. But as I explained, I don't think big demons should be gibbable. HOWEVER, there's nothing wrong with them having a Dismemberment death too: i.e. "a bit more violent" type of death but still not quite gibbing. So, Hell Knight actually has Smooth Doom gibbing animation as its Dismemberment death (and, what do you know, it's activated at -60 health) but it doesn't have any proper gibbing animation. (Well, if you want to get technical, code-wise it's actually a gibbing animation but conceptually it's not.)