Crowd-sourcing animation?

[eRe4s3r]

I would think it's because originally this was top-down pseudo 2.5D and there, these animations really made sense and is how these game were done for eons. However for side-scrollers I agree that the fluidity and diversity of the animations should have taken precedence because you are constantly seeing them. And I think that whatever one sees 99% of the time should be of the highest possible quality.

That said, for this kind of game the animations should either have been /drawn sprite based or fully 3D because that would have allowed IK and rag-dolls. I guess so would have the 2D version of that (each limb separate with a layering function and as bone attachments)

[x4000]

It seems like the problem here is that you've used frame by frame animation. WHY ?

I'm writing a game in flash just now, and it stood out to me immediately that this was a bad idea to do animations. Luckily flash has a built in feature (though perhaps you could code something similar) for 2D armatures. I have an image of a character's arm, head, torso, etc, that are pieced together into the whole, and all animations exist simply as transforms of that armature. one character is a set number of images that will never change no matter how i animate it. I'm not exactly alone in doing something like this, either, it's quite common in many flash games.

flash does have support for runtime armatures as well, which incorporates a lot more math, but that wouldn't be necessary. to me it's purely an authortime tool for making animations that move and flow convincingly, and keep the resource use low.

Generally speaking, unless you have a really good artist doing cartoon-style art, my experience has been that the armature-based animation looks very, very cheap and bad.  Like a puppet.  Frame-by-frame animation gives you much more flexibility when you are working with something that started out as a semi-photo-real 3D model in particular.

Not to knock the armature-based animation, as I think that that can lead to the most superior results of all -- presupposing that you have some very talented artists on-hand who can draw in a suitably non-photoreal fashion.