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Old 19-01-20, 09:14   #19657
Joey79100
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Originally Posted by Krystian View Post
In case you're still interested to know how SSJ6Wolf set this one up, it's actually really clever and I must admit I'm still quite impressed with the solution to this day.

Basically, the idle crawling animation ("on all fours") has one frame where Lara faces the the opposite direction - just one frame. Before and after this the animation is normal. The animation commands panel shows that there are two "Change Direction" effects applied to this flipped frame and the frame right after it. Change Direction is also used for the various roll (Up + Down) animations: on ground, in air and underwater. This explains why in game you don't notice anything, that one frame is flipped in the animation, but simultaneously there is a Change Direction effect so it cancels out (180°+180° = 360°, which looks the same as 0°) . Then the next Change Direction effect reverts it back to normal again for the rest of the animation.

But what is the purpose of this gimmick? Here's where the brilliance shines through, for this one flipped frame (that doesn't looked flipped in game thanks to the effect), there is a State Change that uses the StateID of the "exit crawlspace and hang" move, i.e. StateID 88. But it leads to animation 421, which is indeed the "roll out of crawlspace" animation. And this also explains why the key combination of action + down is needed to trigger the move, because it uses the same StateID Change the as the exit crawlspace backwards move. Pretty neat, huh?
And of course the animation 421 also needs to have the Change Direction effect applied to the first frame to again revert Lara to the original facing, as it is triggered after the first Change of Direction and before the second.

This solution does have its drawback of Lara being able to perform this move only in a single frame window of the idle animation, which means the move isn't as responsive. And of course there was a lot more stuff that needed to be taken care of, similarly the State Changes to "start crawling forwards", "start crawling backwards", etc. had to be handled separately on this single frame, and these animations themselves had to also be seperated to have the Change Direction effect reapplied again to change the facing. But this comes to show how involved this solution is. And for being done with the features available before the TREP/TRNG era, it was really quite the accomplishment imho.

Be sure to check out the other animations, they were also done with similar exploits behind them, it's quite interesting.
Wow that is quite some dedication. I'm glad we don't need to resort to such workarounds as much now (because let's be honest, we still need workarounds sometimes).
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