vagant.anim

How the vagant moves. No clips and no skeleton: the rig is entities, and a pose is a set of Euler angles written onto them.

local Anim = require("vagant.anim")
Anim.pose(rig, {
    t = 3.2,      -- seconds since the body was built
    gait = 1.05,  -- the gait phase, radians; advances with distance covered
    speed = 4.2,  -- horizontal speed, m/s, smoothed
    runT = 0,     -- 0 at a walk, 1 at a run
    wade = 0,     -- 0 dry, 1 up to the knees in a cut
    reach = 0,    -- 0..1, the reach-and-hold of a relight
    hood = 0,     -- 0..1, the jasey pulled down
    caught = 0,   -- 0..1, the moment the fen takes you
    oil = 1,      -- 0..1, what is left in the lantern
    lit = true,   -- is the flame alive
})
Anim.rest(rig)    -- the same, standing still with a full lantern

One function is handed the whole of what the vagant is doing this frame and writes every joint from it, so a walk, a wade, a reach and a collapse are the same code reading different numbers rather than four state machines that can disagree. Everything the caller passes is a blend, so nothing on the body pops.

Angles are DEGREES, in each joint's own parent frame. A limb hangs down -Y, so a positive X rotation swings it FORWARD (-Z is forward here) and a positive Z rotation swings it out to the vagant's right.

Three decisions worth reading

The coat is the walk. The legs are invisible under a coat this long, so the skirt is its own entity hung off the hip: it lags the stride by about a fifth of a cycle and swings wider the faster the vagant goes. That is what tells a walk from a run at the gameplay camera, where no leg is ever seen.

The lantern hangs. Whatever the arm above it did, the bail counter-rotates by the accumulated pitch so the lantern stays upright, and then swings as a pendulum lagging the stride. The carrying arm is held well out from the body — not a comfortable way to carry a lantern, and the reason is the camera: an arm any closer puts the flame behind the coat and the player watches a pool of light with no lantern in it.

The flame gutters. A full lantern burns tall and steady; the last of the oil burns short, quick and uneven — the warning the player reads before the number is. Note that localEulerAngles reads back a plain table, so writing a field on the value it returns changes nothing; the whole property has to be assigned.