Sequence Editor

[v6v]

On working on my game, I've been using a technique called Bone Animation- animating the limbs seperately into one whole body, so that this limb does this, that limb does that

Up until this point, it's been using faux animation, I didn't specify exact angles, it was just a frameset preset to have an animation.

I realized, it would be a pain, to animate each limb's X, Y, an angle of rotation for each frame, even with the real form of Bone Animation.

I've made a GUI to allow me to seamlessly create animations that I can export to .RND files, and then later, import into my game. (Wow, I've really progressed from the point where I had joined this site!)

Features: Angular Change, X, Y Change, Create animations of any frame amount, Playback, Stop, etc.

Upcoming: Flipping (Changing your animation sequence to face the other direction on a button click)

I post this here because (One, I'm really proud that I was able to do this in only 3 days)  Two, I thought it was pretty cool, and might help anyone else interested in animation, or "Pivot like" programs, and Three, you all are expert programmers- I haven't even been to college yet! I need some insight of what to change, what's a better way to do THIS or THAT, any bugs and glitches, any security holes (Something I've taken from Web Programming) and any requested features.

I plan on releasing this as part of the toolkit added to my game. It would be great to have the players make animations without needing the game's source, which would save me work!

File>New>Enter the Sequence name, the amount of frames (Leave it blank if you just want the standard 32 frames) and set whether it loops or not.
The Animation is handled between two objects, Sequence.cs and SequenceFrame.cs. Sequence is the animation, and it has SequenceFrame[] which holds data for each frame.

Usage: There's 3 tools, Selector, Mover, and Rotator. Select the Body part with Selector, then click One of the other tools, and use the Directional Pad to change that property of the sprite.
The purple arrows go through the frames. The Play button plays the animation, and the stop button stops the animation. (I know)

*It may take a second to start* and *The page may take a while to load- I'm considering a better webhost, but I neither have money, nor a credit card, nor parents willing to use theirs.. this will eventually put me at a powerful disadvantage for a game that needs a running masterserver accessed from both the game and the browser*

http://paradigm.heliohost.org/Releases/SEQEDIT001/

[bluemonkmn]

Impressive.  Did you use SGDK2 to create this?  Didn't occur to me to use SGDK2 to create utilities!

It's kind of annoying how the mouse cursor disappears over the frame of that window.  When moving around internally I see the mouse sprite, which may have been convenient for confirming that the program knows where the mouse is, but I like the native mouse cursor better -- I think it updates faster than the project's frame rate too, which is nice.  Any chance of restoring the system mouse pointer?  You could keep a mouse sprite, but I would just suggest to make the sprite invisible instead of the system mouse pointer.

Have you seen SGDK2's frame tweening wizard in the frameset editor?  One idea that might be worth taking from that would be filling in intermediate values.  For example, allow the user to specify the location and rotation of all the bones in two frames, then automatically fill in the intermediate values in between.  Or fill in the intermediate values just for the selected pieces.  I think it would save a *lot* of time.

[v6v]

There's a way to do that in the Frameset Editor? GEE WIZ! I spent up to 4 hours changing each angle  by 1 for each frame in the frameset!

That's a wonderful idea!

[v6v]

Ok, so I've searched the Frameset Editor, and I can't find that function- how exactly do I do that? It would save some serious time.

[bluemonkmn]

In the Frameset menu, there are 2 wizards.  One of them is for tweening frames.

[Tanja]

oh my, that sounds great! what happend to this?

[v6v]

I'm glad you asked! It's actually doing well, last week, I added support for tweening between frames. I can create 2 frames X frames apart and automatically create animation between them. This led to far more realistic walking cycles, and makes it far easier to create animations with it (I created a walking animation in 45 seconds!). You'll all be blown away when I release the demo for my game, that's for sure. A month ago I added support for automatically flipping, by changing the DrawFrame() method in Display.cs.

As soon as finals are over, and I complete all of my tasks for other people online, I'll add support for held items, like weapons - swords. It's a trivial addition to the existing code.

[Vincent]

I can't wait to see this!

[Tanja]

wow! absolutely awesome! I want to see that demo