So - I’ve noticed after loading my save after not playing a while that all my hearthings are missing their eyes. Just… blank faces… It’s kinda eerie to see… They still function and do their jobs and such it’s just… no eyes.
Anyone else know of this problem? I searched the forums and couldn’t find a similar case or solution.
Thx
–BadLuckWind
Not the same, but similar:
When hearthlings execute specific animations, their eyes begin to flash, leaving their faces blank for a few frames. One example would be the seed planting from farmers and cooks:
Note: this screenshot was taken before the multiplayer release on unstable
In old saves hearthlings didn’t have eyes, it was just draw in their face. In the new version it is actually a new body piece. So loading old saves will update their faces (where eyes are not draw) but not add the new piece.
Cusuno, that can be an animation error. @malley
Could this also cause one of my hearthlings out - of - eyebrow experience?
His eyebrows were following him around about a block behind him, lol.
Even worse, we don’t have hierarchy in our animations in game : (. We do in maya when I animate, but not in game. What that means is… when you (irl) turn your head, your eyes travel with your head because they are attached to it right? Similarly your head travels with your neck when it moves, and your neck goes with your torso and so on. For our little hearthling friends this is not the case, each of their bones (including their eyes which have bones) travel independently from each other. And on top of that, there are little errors constantly (unavoidable) in each process of dealing with the animations - so transferring the animations from maya to json, going from json to game, and i think another set when going from game files to actual play files (maybe on that one), and then another set of intentional errors where we are trying to blend one animation to the next and don’t want them to pop (this is probably the biggest problem). So when we blend, we are “interpolating” between two points for each bone - and sadly this means the eyes typically travel through the head instead of with it.
So to put it simpler - the eyes are going from “Hoe” animation to “Idle_Breathe” animation, and when they do they go in a strait line to where they should be - which just happens to be inside the head. And it is unavoidable without massive amounts of work to fix : /.
On the flip side, by ignoring these little problems (if you can) we have really cute animations that express emotions which would not be there otherwise : D.
This problem is exactly as bruno stated - going back far enough, hearthlings will have no eyes : / - which is because their eyes used to be part of their face, but now are separate. I’d suggest rolling up to a newer version of the game (starting a new game in the most recent build) cause there is a lot of cool stuff that has come out since then - like Tier progression. At least on unstable… think that’s on release, but not sure.
This should not happen. When it does, it means that there are no animation curves for the eyebrows to follow (or the eyebrows are named incorrectly). Again I would suggest starting a new game on the latest version of the game.
Understood — Guess I’ll need to say good bye to all my hearthlings and start a new town! Had that save for a few years but I’m excited for the chance to start fresh.
Thanks all for the help on this - take care
–BadLuckWind
A few years? Whoa, you’re really far behind with that one. Surprised the save worked in the first place if it’s that old.
I got Stonehearth ages ago… back before it was on Steam. And the save I’m playing now is the one where incompatible saves went away and you could just continue playing with one constant save for however long you liked. Until now of course lol
Are you very attached to them? Else you can delete the old hearthlings and add new ones.
The closest we have is the attached equipment. A helmet will always follow the head.
So maybe if the eyes worked like equipments it could follow the head precisely. I would guess that it would even allow it to have its own animation, like a blinking animation, without messing with the main body animation.
Which brings another point, would it possible to have asynchronous animations like that? A blinking animation that would play with any other body animations, and maybe even loop asynchronous too? (a common animation have more than 60 frames, in that time the blinking animation would have looped many times.)
I once made a robot, but the animations didn’t worked out, because the wheels required a specific amount of frames to loop well, while the rest of the body required a different amount of frames. It would work if the wheels would play their animation in a loop while the rest of the body played a “grabbing” animation, or attacking, aiming, etc… Basically two animation files, each controlling a different part of the body.
You could create eyes which attach to the head - but they would lose all animation (like emote animations). You could potentially add new animations that only work on the eyes, but then they wouldn’t sync up with the body’s animations. We discussed something like this before implementing the current system, but decided it wouldn’t give us what we wanted.
It is possible to have asynchronous animations - but not without additional work in our engine. @max99x talked about doing it at one point, but when it comes to bang for our buck, there are other lower hanging fruit.
Hi @malley
i believe i have something like Cusuno stated in the first answer:
when a patrolling party turns in a corner of a stockpile the ones that are not leading the group have this faces:
only one is keeping his eyes and the others gone missing for this little time
once they left the corner the eyes are back
just an fyi 
Hey @No_Name, thanks for reporting : ). I assume you’re saying that the eyes only disappear for a short time as they turn or move correct?
Sadly this is just the downside of not having a hierarchical skeleton (the eyes are not children of the head), and is not something we will fix, sorry : /.
Hey @malley, hehee readed the answer for Cusuno after i posted that so i was expecting that xD 
and yup that only happens for that short time
