This is feature request, and is linked to bug #800113
"Support for Animation "play once" and "pause" statements in conf files"
Some terrain types need an animation of seamless tiles to give a credible graphic representation.
Water, Ice flow, lava, swamp should show some movement and for others, while not really necessary,
it would at least be desirable. ("strand" is an example, where the animated waves could
actually roll ashore animated, or "desert", where continuous winds could create a changing pattern.)
One of the major drawbacks in the way Widelands handles animations, is that for any given tile,
the animation cycle is synchronized for all clones.
I'd like to give an example: I had experimented with a swamp terrain, that would show ascending
bubbles, to convey the idea of "unstable ground".
I could do an animation that shows a bubble being released every 40 sec or so.
The effect inside the game would show a swamp suddenly boiling up every 40 seconds, synchronized
on all tiles, which is ridiculous.
Instead, I would like an effect so that on a surface that shows 30 swamp tiles, maybe one
bubble emerges about every 5 seconds or so at varying locations.
The obvious solution would be to have about 10 different terrain animation (each 40 sec long!),
that each have a starting point of their own. They would have to be placed painstakingly and individually by the mapmaker. That makes up for hundereds of pictures, just for one nice terrain animation. Hardly acceptable.
Instead I am suggesting not only the "play once" animations from bug #800113 (see above), but a way to
form a variable number of groups from the tiles' clones, that start their animation cycle with an configurable offset in time, all using the same pictures.
I could image this to be an editor feature, set up at map creation, or else just a conf file entry that would randomly form such groups and play them delayed.
Setting to incomplete for bug sweeping.