Armour

[sapi]

I'm not so sure about that. This is what Lusted said regarding faster pike units in Kingdoms:

Whoops, may be wrong then.

Was just going off what Ciaran said on the matter...

I guess that means that there's a (hardcoded?) variable that also effects speed...

[Ciaran]

Well, there´s the battlemap_movement_modifiers.txt to consider as well. And if you edit that you do get the "moonwalk" effect Husar mentioned. My knowledge, though, is mostly of RTW, so if things have changed for M2TW my statement might not be valid any longer.

[Husar]

I think calculating their speed using the polygon speed of their feet or something like that sounds like a rather demanding task for the processor, simply using a tweaked variable that lets their bodies move forward at a certain speed should be a lot easier to program and saves ressources, the end result is pretty much the same, you just have to tweak the variable so you don't get the moonwalk effect, I think that's how pretty much every game does it. If you have adjustable unit speeds you will usually see that the animation slows down as well, that doesn't give the moonwalk thing but the unit looks like it's moving in slow motion. The only thing that is affected by animations are follow-up actions which have to wait until the current animation cycle is finished, otherwise you'd mess a lot of things up.

Of course the easiest way to find out would be a CA dev sharing some of their knowledge, but that's the best I can come up with using my limited programming knowledge. To make it short, yes, there should be a variable that determines speed, it seems the most logical to me.

edit: Hehe, just thought about it again, if you somehow calculate the unit speed using the animations, you inevitably end up with a single variable anyway so you just add a lot of calculation for the CPU with not real gain, if you just put someone in front of a computer for a day to tweak the variables manually, you should get much better results.

[John_Longarrow]

Husar,

Instead of having one person sit there tweaking the variable, just open up the animation and calculate the distance and count the number of frames. That gets you your movement for that animation.

ie, if it takes 10 frames to move 2m, your speed with that animation is 6 meters per second. If it takes 30 frames to move 2m, your speed is 2 meters per second.

[Husar]

Husar,

Instead of having one person sit there tweaking the variable, just open up the animation and calculate the distance and count the number of frames. That gets you your movement for that animation.

ie, if it takes 10 frames to move 2m, your speed with that animation is 6 meters per second. If it takes 30 frames to move 2m, your speed is 2 meters per second.

That should work fine as long as you don't alter the frames per second of the animation. I don't know enough about 3D engines to say how exactly they use animations.