Idle animations for monsters... ?

[Trilinear]

I'm thinking about making some extra frames for the monsters for the purpose of giving them a standing "idle" animation. I'd probably need only 2 or 3 frames per monster, but I think anything other than the standard 2-frame running loop animation is an improvement no?

A few months back I made a simple dehacked patch which disables the second idle animation frame (by causing the first frame to exist for -1ms), causing the monsters to freeze Hexen-style when not running around. I think they look too inactive like this though, and think that a few touch ups to indicate "heavy breathing" or even perhaps "drooling" (in the case of the Demon) would be a nice improvement.

I doubt it would be too difficult, all it would involve is tweaking the existing sprites very slightly for each of the 8-or-so angles. And I could certainly spare the time over the next few months. I'm under the assumption that it would only require the additional frames to be imported into a seperate IWAD, then the extra frames assigned to each monster as idle animations using DeHackEd.

What do you guys think? Has anything like this been attempted previously?

OK so maybe you won't see the idle anims too often, but if you're like me and enjoy playing Doom for the atmosphere and not a continuous bloodbath - it could become even more absorbing :)

[Mordeth]

I'm planning to do this for my TC, although it's pretty low on my priorities list.

[Jayextee]

Do it. Go to town, and include soldiers fiddling with their armaments, imps picking flesh out of their claws, and cacodemons licking their lips. We'll all love you for it :D

And, uh, 'snoozing' spideys, complete with anime sleep bubble.... uh, maybe not :p

[Ed]

I'd like to know who's bright idea was it to make every monster stomp it's foot repeatedly in an idle state.

[Trilinear]

Ed said:

I'd like to know who's bright idea was it to make every monster stomp it's foot repeatedly in an idle state.

I agree that it looks unusual, but it's probably the best id could do at the time with the animations that were there. They probably didn't want to make them frozen in one frame because they looked too static.

I don't see why they couldn't have made one or two extra frames for each of the models for an idle state though. Surely with the latex & clay models this wouldn't have been a huge effort.

I think the reason is that the player wouldn't actually get to see the creatures inactive that often (if at all). But using noclip or notarget it can be painfully obvious (particularly the Spider Mastermind - awful!).

[jute]

this is a pretty cool idea.

[Vegeta]

Trilinear said:

I think the reason is that the player wouldn't actually get to see the creatures inactive that often (if at all). But using noclip or notarget it can be painfully obvious (particularly the Spider Mastermind - awful!).

What about when the player dies.