Sidescrolling Shooter Body Animation

Now my bad guys are fairly straight forward, they face left, or right...and that's it. The humans on the other hand, they can aim...and I've tried various methods of animating this and none look very natural.

I've tried the following methods:

Seperating the torso from the legs and rotating the torso.

Seperating the head and the arms from the torso, but leaving the torso connected to the legs, and rotating the arms/head instead.

None of these appear very natural and I was wondering if any of you knew of a way to solve this problem using some effects or an image manipulator trick or something. I'm just hoping I don't have to stylize it in the end with Worms-esque floating hands or a human that looks straight forward and fires straight up, or something.

I think I'm going to try rotating the entire body, but not directly at the mouse, just enough (10-20 degrees up/down), so that the player can tell he's looking up or down. There will still be a crosshair to know exactly where, I just wanted some feedback with the player model.

Break the arms into two and limit the upper arms angle. That might help. And limit the heads up/down angle so there's no neck "breaking"

Also can use a subtle skew with the new sprite feature as well. Perhaps to help lean more fluidly (along with any animation/rotation).

The horizontal skew and a very slight rotation are working miracles, but the image point the gun fires from does not skew with the image, meaning when I aim up and it skews left, the bullets are spawning from mid air rather than out of the gun.

Also I'm having a lot of runtime crashing and freezing with the platform behavior right now...to test the skew expression out I literally had to turn it off, cause it crashes almost every time I run the program.

[quote:34unwmeo]the image point the gun fires from does not skew with the image

Woops, forgot to take this in to account. Will fix for next build.

[quote:34unwmeo]Also I'm having a lot of runtime crashing and freezing with the platform behavior right now

Yep, lots of bug reports in the platform behavior at the moment - I'll try sorting it out.

[quote:laoixdvz]Yep, lots of bug reports in the platform behavior at the moment - I'll try sorting it out.

Sorry I couldn't be more specific with the bug reports, but it seems to be any time any part of the sprite touches the ground or leaves the screen. When it spawned in mid air and fell to the ground it froze when it hit the ground, regardless of where the hotspot was. Sometimes it would hit the ground and succeed but freeze when I tried to move. I turned off gravity to test the skew and then noticed it also freezes when it skews off the side of the screen (and there's no solids over there, so I don't know what's going on).