Adventures in Map Zoom... Animation? (Patreon)

Towards the end of the map zooming work I couldn't help but take advantage of the opportunity for a new animation to test out a lot of possible concepts. Like dozens and dozens of them :P

I felt there was a lot of potential in animating an upscale through some combination of modifications to the four map cells making up a single oct, so started by creating a temporary layer that duplicated the tile contents in a 2x2 layout matching the eventual oct locations.

You can see how for a moment each new tile is composed of four matching tiles still using the original size. What can we do with that...

Here they're "growing" out of the bottom left corner of each cell until merging into the final form:

This one instead blocks out all but the bottom left sub-tile, making it seem like the transition to a larger form happens near instantly into the newly available space once they're spread out.

Instead of a directional growing motion, this one has the individual smaller map cells randomly convert to what should be in that quadrant of the larger version, essentially a lot of smaller versions merging into a larger one, but in a random order.

That animation above also looks pretty cool in ASCII, seeing a bunch of the same smaller characters randomly merging to form a larger one in their place.

Putting the larger tile together with what is instead a circular motion, using a constant speed but slightly randomized duration for the transition of each piece:

As above but with a gradual fade-in:

And a smoother version with all randomness removed for a uniform look:

Many of the above recordings are not how the animations would look in their final polished form, often using slower speeds, for one, so I can better see how they're functioning. In real use you wouldn't want this animation to take much time at all, around 200ms at most. Here is a faster version of the last one, for example:

Throughout the process I also experimented with numerous types of overlays, generally randomized animations akin to Cogmind's other glitchy fade-ins and fade-outs, but none of those panned out.

The problem with animations like all of these is that they can be too distracting when the purpose of adjusting your zoom is clearly to get a better look at something or some things, be it closer up or further away. So you need to be able to quickly focus, a need which most animations are likely to detract from.

And while sure it's fun to get a cool new animation, if it gets in the way it would more easily "get old."* Yeah we could make it optional, but if it's detrimental and most people would presumably want it off, then why add it in the first place?

*on that note, I do plan to eventually swap out the world map animation for something snappier! the world outgrew that thing a long time ago...

In light of that analysis, and having not found anything extremely compelling while exploring animation styles, from early on I was already leaning towards having no animation at all--short and sweet, right? Instantaneous results, either big like you want it or small like you want it.

But maybe there's some other type of animation that could add a little style and maybe even be somewhat helpful for quickly digesting the new view area...

I got to thinking that one of the main elements that's universally important and the first aspect you might visually analyze is the general layout of the map. This is usually defined by walls and doors, so what if we just highlighted all of those after a zoom?

That's what I ended up going with for now, a non-blocking simple highlight applied directly to the map interface, rather than some more complex animation layer. Zooming out lets the highlight last longer since it's more relevant in that case, having added new content to your viewport.

Also in ASCII:

I also considered highlighting other objects like machines and hostiles and/or something more, but figure it's easy to go overboard and get back into distraction territory, so decided to stop there for now.

Aside from the animation work, I've also got additional details about the map zooming interface work which will be coming to the blog later as part of my series on the zoom feature (but fewer animation samples there :P)

Since these animations might otherwise be hard to see at a small size, in case anyone wants to examine them more closely I've included them as an attachment as well, including ASCII versions for most.