Engine Tutorial - 04 - Be Done With It

This will be the final update concerning the animation system, next week I'm starting on the actual story part of the game.

But, I think that what I've shown so far wasn't quite conclusive about how you use the animation system. So let's take a look at that. First off, I made the begin.state file into a showcase.state (and gave it separate access in the bonus menu), while a new begin.state will take care of actually running the game soon.

For the showcase, I decided to do an animation player with the animations being played from files, it doesn't actually if it's done using a file or not though. As you can see, I use a parsev command here to execute the contents of the file in place, much the same way as I've done before in the build.state. I'll show you the files I've prepared at the end.

I also added a menu, by this point you should have enough of a grasp over what I'm doing to be able to tell what's happening here, maybe apart from the usage of ?? over ? in the grammar statements. That switches it from reading a variable to evaluating an integer statement. Otherwise, it works the same way as I've explained in the last blog.

This state essentially loops around itself, reading a new file according to the variable we set here (you might also note it was initially set to "idle"). There's an interesting thing about this. If you go to options and disable caching, you can read the current state of an animation file as you edit it outside of the game and you can refresh the animations without having to close out of anything. Essentially this makes the whole thing a tool you can use to craft animation sequences before putting them to use. 

And here are the animation files:

Yeah, I'm not the greatest animator. I'm definitely doing this system a disservice. But it's a simple and yet potent system. Now if only I actually had any use for it!

In any case...

I mentioned planning some list of animation archetypes. Unfortunately, the truth is that I keep tweaking and adding to them, and that means I'll not be able to give a definite one right now.