Update: Bit of explanation- this is the spritepage editor, the precursor to the animation tool. It is simply for defining sprite areas on an image and will shortly provide image optmisation. As you can see it will make it very simple to import sprites by name into both the animation tool and the game itself and stops you having to directly manipulate images and filenames repeatedly. The idea is to encapsulate image data away from the code itself, provide high-level, language-independent access to sprites and animations, and to provide a GUI for complete customisation of graphical content without having to open either your IDE or a drawing package!
Imagine for the sake of example that you wanted the missile below to fly out of and circle the big weird-looking mechanical thing (this is not a great example because missiles would almost certainly be an interacting entity, but pretend that they are purely visual- perhaps some electric orbs or something would be more fitting), and at the same time the big mecha thing would be animating like so: Img1 for 2 frames, Img2 for 1 frame... ad infititum (as would the missile). Without the editor there are 2 ways of doing this- coding it, or physically creating lots of almost identical frames of the same size in a graphical tool, and looping them. Both approaches are tedious at best and wasteful at worst. With Squinker, each 'element' will never be replicated and the only data required by the game is an image and some XML data. What's more, someone with no coding experience can mess with animations and immediately see the results in-game. We could have mad complex animations with zero additional time cost.
Pic updated.
ReplyDelete