Animation Engine
After an evening of working together to get through animation system bugs mentioned in a previous post, we’ve made a lot of progress and things are starting to come together nicely. Our custom SpriteML™ XML format continues to become more powerful as new “operations” are added into the format. The best part is, they work.
Imagine a world where you can write an XML file, load a sprite, and with just a couple of lines of code have a fully animated character walking around on your screen. I’m sure to people “in the industry” this sort of thing is commonplace and entirely non-exciting, but as a guy that has had a desire to code games since he was seven, and a profession that has had nothing to do with games at all his whole life, well, it’s pretty darn cool.
As things get trickier with the XML and features are added, a sprite editor program is beginning to make more and more sense. Since that would mean a huge side effort that would need to be changed every time we tweak the animation system in the game (an occurrance that is extremely likely to happen a lot at this point) I think now is not a good time to start that project. Choosing instead to favor the game itself with our development efforts.
At this point I still need to reinvent collision detection to work properly within the bounds of this cool new system, but I don’t honestly think that will be so bad in the end. After that it’s back to the map system, but this time with a better sprite system under the hood. I stalled out waiting on features that now exist. These are very exciting times indeed.