Jetaman wrote:One suggestion from me: the thing that make me unconfartable when I play MXL is the limited number of monster animations. Even though lots of new animations were added from the Infinitum website, it still feels like there are a lot of repetitions and de ja vu. For example, the Witch and the amazon spirit look the same. What do they have in common? Nothing. Then why do they look the same?
So my suggestion - if Sigma is going to be unique and brilliant in other stuff that you're working on, why not upgrade the 'animation department'. Firstly, you already have the 3d conversions from Inertia. Secondly, I'm working on my own animation pack which will be pretty big. The preview of my animations can be viewed
here.
I'm taking these animations from all possible sprite-based rgps and also, with the help from Inertia I learned how to make 3d conversions of Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim models and here is the preview of Lich from Oblivion. Using this way I can create hundreds and hundreds of new animations, which can be used for Sigma. Because variety is always good - you don't have to repeat monsters using different palettes.
The biggest problem with this is simply quality. There are tons of games that you could convert or render, but it's more than that. You have to ask yourself:
1. Do these animations fit with D2's graphic style? If not, then reusing existing animations are the lesser of two evils.
2. Do these sprites contain all the necessary animations (A1,DT,DD,GH,NU,WL)? Ofc they aren't all necessary and there are workarounds, but once again, there are existing animations with all their necessary animations and that look nice, so why change it? Sure new graphics are good to attract new players, but overall I would say polish is more important.
The infinitum animations are probably the closest to d2's style you'll find and even some of those don't look very good. My animation pack was only made because the animations I used look close enough to d2's style and have all their necessary animations. Even then, if you haven't noticed the GetHit animations from my packs are just the death animation played a few frames forward and then reversed. They don't look amazing, but they work.