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Is sprite sub-pixel frame-based animation supported?

by Michael Copley · in Torque Game Builder · 10/07/2005 (5:33 pm) · 4 replies

Hi,

Please forgive me if this has already been covered before as I'm new to this forum and am considering the Torque 2D engine for a product design of mine. I want to know if the Torque 2D engine includes a frame-based animation engine with sub-pixel accuracy. I don't see it mentioned as a feature point, and none of the demos seem to use frame-based animation. All of the sprite behavior appears to be either particle fx, sprite color/alpha changing fx, or sprite rotation/translation/scale... For example, I want to be able to have an animating character that runs, etc. through frame animation -- can this be easily achieved with the engine? If so, is there a tool in place [ such as the tile editor ] to help set these animations up?

Thanks,

Mike
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Torque Owner Michael Copley
#1
10/07/2005 (8:35 pm)
Okay, I think I managed to get the answer to this that I was looking for after perusing a lot of the posts of the last 4 months or so. It would appear that frames of animation are stored as separate image files that all must be managed by the app. In addition, there doesn't appear to be any frame-based animation system, or tools per se [ outside of what you can manipulate yourself through script ]. Sub-pixel accuracy is present and stems from the underlying 3d rendering that is used to render the sprites.

Torque Owner Joe Rossi
Indri Games
#2
10/07/2005 (10:12 pm)
There are a few examples of using sprites in T2D but only in the private forums. I believe some editors are being developed to make this much easier, time will tell.

Torque Owner Rob Riddell
#3
10/15/2005 (3:45 am)
Hi,
What format for the image files for the animations? I was starting to look at this engine for 2d machinima project. I am just starting research so I have very little knowledge of the 2D engine. I have read the Ken Finney book on the 3d engine an am having fun playing with that.

smiles. . .

Torque Owner Philip Mansfield
Default Studio Name
#4
10/15/2005 (4:47 am)
For animations, you need to have a number of individual sprite frames. You paste these althogther (with a graphcis app) into an image strip. When you setup your animations in T2D you specify the frames which make up the animation, as well as the amount of time it should take to play the whole animation.

Supported image formats are pretty much what you'd expect - JPG, PNG and so-on. PNG is my favourite due to the alpha channel :)

There's no tweening support in T2D yet, but the animation system is one of the things that Melv is planning on overhauling, but I don't know when that will be. Take a look at this for what some of the community members are doing though: http://www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=8660