Creatures Caves

So many people seem fascinated by my taur breeds that I thought I might as well explain how I did it!

It's really nothing revolutionary... I basically cheated. [nblush]

The Epic story of how Centaur norns came to be

Flawed basis:
The original plan was to have norns that walk with 4 horse legs by building the legs from the many sprites that go into their composition. This, however, turned out to be a headache starter and also much more code lacing then I could dare to look at... So I figured out a much easier way to do it.
Breedgeneer's note:
While I did figure out how to do it with all leg sprites, so they could theoretically walk and lay down normally, it didn't lend itself well to a horse's walk cycle. It would have resembled a camel's rather then a horse's.

Simplicity:
I bypassed the problem of animating several parts by making the horse body into one single solid block, legs and all.
Breedgeneer's note:
I did try to make the tail separate so that it could move, but the horse's butt is so far off the norn's actual body that it caused it to be in the negative numbers when the norn headed right. I tried it anyway to see how the att system would react to negative numbers...
Long story short: it didn't work.

Logical development:
I made the horse body a hip sprite so it would overlap the norn's body. That worked for heading right, heading left and facing. For the facing away, it didn't work. The hips are actually behind the body in that position causing the body of the norn to appear over the horse body. I had to set the horse's butt on the tail sprite instead.
Breedgeneer's note:
That's why, if they are crossbred and receive a foreign tail sprite, the horse body disappears when they face away.

Lively Animation:
Now, since i 'cheated' and used a single sprite in the hip position to achieve my desired goal; that meant I only had 4 sprites to make a horse walk. Walk cycles generally use a lot more then 4 images, so it was a bit difficult, but not impossible.

I searched online for things called time sheets; they are a series of images of an animal in action. I found some on horses and studied their leg positions when they walked. I knew i had to make them walk, because if they galloped then the centaurs would constantly be standing in strange leg positions. (Since I didn't have the luxury of an idle state.) It took a lot of adjusting to get the cycle to look right. I found that saving the sprites as jpgs and using a gif maker to artificially create the movement really helped in figuring out what needed adjusting.

I used this free web gif maker:
GifNinja.com

It has adjustable speed, which was a HUGE help, since my norns always seem to walk so fast!

Final note:
I think that's about it. Everything else was just hard work and my typical stubbornness... and of course help from Norngirl, who watched me stream my struggle with the Centaurs shading for bloody hours before I could get it right.

Many thanks again to norngirl for making the genomes for the breed, in-game sprite testing and making colourful starters.