Animations

Each Actor can have several animations. Just one animation is showed at once.

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

No Renderer

This renderer must be choosen when the actor is an interactive spot. The actor will not be visible and no animations can be asigned to this actor.

Image Renderer

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

Images are in the images folder inside the project asset folder.

Atlas Renderer

This is the best method to do tradicional frame by frame animation. All animation frames are packed in a texture atlas.

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 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 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 flipped will be used. Also works for the left.

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 flipped automatically when the player is facing the right side.