Animating a Sprite Sheet April 9, 2009

Posted by legendsoftheblackmoon in games.
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O_o .. interesting part now, gotta animate the stilllife all around. Its really quite simple, what i did that is:

Assuming all the animations are laid out neatly ina  sprite sheet, we have a table.

With rows and columns, so any algo would read thus:

1.  Get Row of Anim

2. Get Column of Anim

3. Get Anim : Height & Width

4. OnAnimStart() – Load source image from sprite sheet as a rectangle with

Height = Anim Height

Width = Anim Width

Position = (X,Y)   :  (0,0) Initially:

5. For subsequent frames,

increment Position.X by Sprite.Width times

And here’s the code

//Animation variables
protected int currFrame = 0;
protected int currRow = 0;
protected int currFrameSpeed = 0;
protected int animeThreshold = 8;

public Rectangle rectSource;
public Rectangle rectDestination;
/**Animate Sprite**/
if(currRow == 0)
{
if(this.currFrame < 6)
{
this.currFrameSpeed += 1;
if (this.currFrameSpeed == animeThreshold)
{
this.currFrameSpeed = 0;
this.currFrame += 1;
}
}
else
{
this.currFrameSpeed = 0;
this.currFrame = 0;
}
}
else
{
this.currRow = 0;
this.currFrameSpeed = 0;
this.currFrame = 0;
}

rectSource = new Rectangle(currFrame * this.spriteWidth, currRow * this.spriteHeight, this.spriteWidth, this.spriteHeight);
rectDestination = new Rectangle((int)this.position.X, (int)this.position.Y, this.spriteWidth, this.spriteHeight);

Additionally i found the need to control the speed of the animation, this was accomplished by adding a control variable

currFrameSpeed

i kept on incrementing it till it reached a predecided threshold.

Simple ha, of course this is just a simple and ok,ok way of doing it

Characteristically speaking February 1, 2009

Posted by legendsoftheblackmoon in games.
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Woah, its been months since my last post, but hey, LotBM is moving ahead with full steam.

Finally got down to the gruelling task of coding the actual game, and.. well waddayaknow – time to select characters

Dunno, some where between new Character(), i was like, this guy (dont ask me why not gal ) shud be a mage, spellcaster, now, ahaa… ,

“Now introducing .. from the Hogwarts Adult School of  Magic, with a degree in Defence Against the Dark Arts, i a proud to announce – The Speller of Doom” 

**Drumroll**

Now, this fella’s gonna be the yardstick for the rest of em, with common features like:

characterName, characterStatus, etc.. and methods like move(), fight(), interact().

 

Soon, new character classes to come. Keep watching this space

The XNAtor July 3, 2008

Posted by legendsoftheblackmoon in games.
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Now when i decided to make LotBM ( Legends of the Black Moon), i had these nagging doubts at the back of my medula oblongata that making a game would be a huge deal – after all , all i  know abt em is the genre’s.. hehe well a lot but still, not even a modicum of experience in coding a game. All i had was, a half baked project (.. for that matter, idea also ) of a browser based MMORPG “The Gaffer”, [ A FIFA meets Fantasy Soccer messup ] in crude JSP.

So the obvious points of interest were which language, platform etc … Windows was a natural and logical choice. But when choosing a language i was torn between quite a few…. knew it cud be done wid C++, OpenGL and Dx9, seen another  friend do it in Java, with a  lil J2ME experience myself i felt i cud go mobile. But then i yearned, had, for the better part of my virtual life to one day be able to make / play my own PC game. So neways, i decided on basing my game on the XNA Framework, which is a .Net compact framework derivative or something. It even came with its own IDE, which was actually a Visual Studio (2005) plug in.

SO here i am…

Platform : Windows XP, Vista

Language : XNA, C#

Graphics / Sprites : Adobe Photoshop (:p doesnt everyone)

Dev Suite : Visual Studio 2005 ( SP 1 )

I usually use SciTe for text editing .. and got some books on XNA and C# programming

1. Beginning XNA 2.0 Game Programming From Novice to Professional
2. Sams Teach Yourself Visual C# 2008 in 24 Hours
3. Beginning CSharp Game Programming
4. Google .. Meh

Apparently XNA offers a basic template for developing a game, and u can even make XBOX compatible games .. pretty cool eh. So i fire up the IDE, launch a new Windows Game and i see a skeleton of my very first XNA game.. cool lets code..

While coding in XNA, according soem tutorials i read ..

Initialize graphics, input and sound
Load resources
Start game loop. In every step:
Gather user input
Perform needed calculations (AI, movements, collision detection, etc.)
Test for game ending criteria – if met, stop looping
Draw (render) screen, generate sounds and game controller feedback
Finalize graphics, input, and sound
Free resources

Are the basic.. is the basic Algo that is to be followed …

I see a program.cs and game1.cs ..

XNA Game class overridable methods:

Filename : Game1.cs
Game1() – General initialization (already written for us)
Initialize() – Include nongraphics initialization here
LoadContent() – Include graphics initialization here
Run() – Start game loop. In every step:
Update() – Include code here to read and process user input, do calculations for AI, movements, and collisions, and test for game ending
Draw() – Include the drawing (renderization) code here
UnloadContent() – Free graphics resources

Filename : Program.cs

static class Program
{
/// <summary>
/// The main entry point for the application.
/// </summary>
static void Main(string[] args)
{
using (Game1 game = new Game1())
{
game.Run();
}
}
}