General Spell Visuals: How They Can Be Even Better

Right now, Wynncraft has some pretty sick looking spells. I remember watching the 2.0 reveal trailer and literally flipping out at how cool meteor looked. That being said, there's one small thing that I think could make them even better than they already are. Now, this only applies to particle spells, like uppercut, spin attack, thunderstorm, etc, but I still think it's a worth change (assuming it's as easy to implement as I assume).

Really, my only problem with spell animations right now is how rigid they look. Take whirlwind strike, for instance. You use the spell and a huge blue slash appears instantly in front of you. But that's exactly my problem. It just appears. There's no animation to it, it just creates the effect all at once. There's very little semblance of movement. Just a giant blue slash that instantly pops into existence and then fades out afterwards. It feels a bit off, because you'd expect the warrior to, you know, actually swing the spear. So, my recommendation is for the spell animations to be more, well, animated. Here's a poorly drawn example I made in Microsoft paint:
So instead having all the particles for the spell appear at once, they appear in small groups, the ones near the front of the swing appear first, and the ones at the end appear last, in a somewhat smooth animation. This would help the spell have more movement and life to it, allowing the player to really feel like the warrior is making a massive swing with the spear.

In my opinion, applying this more animated style to as many particle-based spells as possible would make the spells look even better than they already do. Yes, it really isn't that big of an improvement to wynncraft as a whole, but it seems like a relatively easy thing to implement with great aesthetic payoff. I'd love to see spin attack actually spin, half moon swipe actually be a swipe, etc. There are even some spells that already do this, like thunderstorm for example. The particles at the top of the thunderstorm appear before the ones below them, making for a nice little animated lightning strike (although I think it's a bit lacking in fluidity due to the small number of animation frames). In fact, thunderstorm is what inspired this thread in the first place.

Of course, if a dev knows this is actually much more difficult to implement in game than I expect and isn't worth the effort, or if people strongly disagree and think it would be better to keep the instantaneous nature of particle spells, I'm open to criticism. However, I really do think this would be a neat little change that would make spells look a lot cooler.

 

they actually do appear, but yeah it would be nice if the animations were slower

 

Not just slower, but also having more frames. The spells I noticed that did have some animation to them were still really rigid. Like I said for thunderstorm, there's like 3 animation frames, making for a really jerky visual. If that was increased to say, 10 frames, it would look waaaayyyyy smoother. I'd argue that giving animations more frames would look vastly better than just decreasing the speed.

 

That would be great, but do you think that would add lag?

 

I don't think so, cause it wouldn't actually increase the number of particles spells use, just change the time that some of them appear.

 

This would cause there to be a greater number of particles in the area at once, contributing to lag (if I cast six spells in two seconds, and each animation takes two seconds, I'm going to have six spell animations going at once, making that many particles appear). As someone who already gets 20 fps in Wynncraft, I'm not a huge fan of this idea.

 

If this was implemented the animations would most likely take under a second to finish otherwise the spells would seem very sluggish.

 

IDK, we need someone from the animations team to give us their opinion.

 

Thanks for giving us your opinion!

 

They're saying that the same number of particles will be created, just over a longer period of time. This would obviously not increase the number of particles.

 

What I was saying was that the issue is that if these spells have particles going over a long amount of time, then when multiple spells are cast rapidly, their particles will be in the same place at the same time, because spells cast previously will still have particles going.

 

Suppose a spell uses three smoke particles and that smoke particles last 0.5 seconds before disappearing. You cast the spell a first time at 0 seconds, a second time at 0.2 seconds, and a third time at 0.6 seconds. These particles can use the current system and appear at the same time (left half of image) or use the suggestion and appear staggered (right half of image). Here's what that looks like:

You're still generating nine particles in total. No matter what you do, you can never increase the maximum number of particles at any given moment (in this case, 6) solely by offsetting when the particles are created. You can, however, have two or more spells creating particles at the same time (such as the third column on the right side). You're more likely to have two spells' particles at the same time, such as in this image (compare sixth column in both top and bottom):

You'll also have the particles last a bit longer overall (compare 1.1 seconds on the left versus 1.3 seconds on the right in the first image).

 

this just isn't really feasible. It either makes spells look like they cast too slow, or actually cast too slow. The fastest frames can be is 1 tick, which would already be so fast the particles would just blend together and look too messy

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Oh wait this was from like 20 days ago why is the forums telling me this is a new post