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Sheep

Sheep are the most iconic and adorable creatures in Tiny Glade. They wander peacefully around your buildings and love being petted.
Under the hood, their behavior and animation system are implemented in a very unique way.

Sheeps

Meshes

The sheep's 3D models (meshes) are located in the meshes/sheep_animation folder. There are 31 separate mesh files used for animations:

  • 30 files for the walking animation, named 1.json through 30.json
  • 1 file for the petting animation, named delighted.json

Info

The 1.json mesh is also used for the idle animation.

Each mesh file contains a standard set of meshes attributes:
- Vertex_Position: the 3D coordinates of each vertex
- Vertex_Normal: the direction each vertex is facing - Vertex_Color: the color of each vertex

Animation

The sheep animation system works by switching between mesh frames:

  • Idle state: The sheep remains on the 1.json mesh.
  • Walking state: The sheep cycles through the 30 walking frames (1.json to 30.json) in a loop, creating the illusion of movement.
  • Petting state: When the player pets a sheep, its mesh switches to delighted.json, showing a happy reaction.

the original animation last 30 frame but you don't have to make yours last that long, you can loop through your frames to create a shorter one. but it require the 30 files to work properly if not, the game crash at startup.

🔧 Technical Constraints

For the animation to work properly, all meshes must meet strict structural requirements:

  • They must have the exact same number of vertices.
  • The vertices must be listed in the same order across all meshes.

This is crucial because the animation system interpolates between vertex positions over time. If the vertex count or order differs between frames, the animation will break or cause visual artifacts.

wrong_vertex_order

if the number of vertex is not even between models you will get the following error :

ERROR [tiny_glade::panic_reporter] [frame:0] PANIC: panicked at crates/country-core/src/startup/startup_sheep.rs:98:21:
index out of bounds: the len is 860 but the index is 860

where the 860 is the length of your shortest mesh

Danger

If you're exporting or modifying sheep meshes in Blender: Make sure the export script does not reorder the vertex list.

Version Notes

  • Versions ≤ 1.13: Each mesh must contain exactly 860 vertices.
  • Version ≥ 1.14: This limitation has been lifted. Meshes can have any vertex count, as long as it's consistent across all animation frames.