Animations

Sprite or Character actors can have several animations or sprites. Just one animation is showed at once for the object.

As shown in the next image. When creating an actor, the 'renderer' field is used to choose the renderer for the animation.

Image Renderer

This type of animations are still images, .png or .jpg formats are supported.

Images must be located in the images folder inside the project asset folder.

Atlas Renderer

This is the best method for making traditional frame by frame animation. All animation frames are packed in a texture atlas.

An atlas can have multiple animations or still images.

A sequence of pngs can be packed in an atlas to create animations. For animations, the name of the image sequence must be like that:

name_00.png name_01.png name_02.png ....

Still images have no restriction in his name.

In this link https://github.com/libgdx/libgdx/wiki/Texture-packer you can find how to create an texture atlas. Atlases can be created inside the Adventure Composer using the Atlas button.

Atlases are located in the atlases folder inside the project asset folder.

All actors and animations in The Goddess Robbery game use atlases.

Spine Renderer

Spine is a proprietary tool to create skeletal based animations. The Blade Engine supports animations created with Spine. When creating a project you can select to include the spine support, to use Spine animations, you must have a Spine License.

More information about purchasing and using Spine can be found in http://es.esotericsoftware.com/

Spine files are in the spine folder inside the project asset folder. Atlases used by the spine animations are in the atlases folder.

A project example using Spine can be found in the Adventure Test Spine.

3D renderer

The Blade Engine supports 3D character animation. 3D objects will be integrated in the 2D scene. Each object will have a defined camera, light and shadow.

Stand, Walking and Talk animations

There are some special animations used by characters in the Blade Engine:

• Stand Animation: Is the animation used when a charactor or the player is in the idle pose. The name/id for this animation must be stand.
• Walk Animation: Is the animation used when a character walks. The name/id for this animation must be walk.
• Talk Animation: Is the default animation used when a character talks. The name/id for this animation must be talk.

These special animations can have a direction suffix in the name. The suffixes allowed are:

• .left
• .right
• .front
• .back
• .frontleft
• .frontright
• .backleft
• .backright

You can create animations only for the right side and the left animations will be automatically created flipping the right side animations. Also works for the left side.

You can have a basic player setup with this animations only:

• stand.left
• walk.left
• talk.left

For a typical setup, we can add more animations to add variety in the movement:

• stand.front
• stand.back
• walk.front
• walk.back
• talk.front

And for 8 direction movement, we can add the rest of animations:

• stand.frontleft
• stand.backleft
• talk.frontleft
• talk.backleft

All animations will be automatically flipped when the player is facing the right side.