11/03/2010: More advanced walk animation

Today, I wanted to make the walk of Simon more fluid and believable. As became clear today, creating an animation by means of Illustrator is not straightforward, especially when you take into considation all the transformations one has to make to pump all that information in one texture file. Especially, the anti-aliasing when saving to PNG was a pain. Currently, I have figured out a tedious, manual proces, but hey, it's a process :)

Secondly, I decided to use a 8's walk (24 fps / 8 drawings for one step = 3 steps a second). According to Richard Williams it's a "Slow run or 'cartoon walk'". The 12's walk was a bit too slow for this game and it took too much drawings. Anyway here is the result (one big texture that is loaded into XNA).

On the technical side two features were added:

1. MovieClip2D class: this class was refactored a bit and now contains stable logic to 'animate' a figure. It reads out the texture and keeps a pointer to the current part of the texture that should be rendered.
2. Animation configuration: all necessary information about the texture, the animation's frames, their location and pivot points is stored in one XML file for each figure. As such, it is easier to change settings and - here we are again - a tool could create that file.