12/03/2010: Dog walk animation and run animation

This is the last day of my 'holiday' week in which I've done a lot of work on the 'Le village perdu' game. But there is still A LOT to do! Since there is no machine yet that can stretch or slow down time, I guess I'll have to take some other holiday days/weeks in the months to come...

Anyway, what has been done today? Well, two animations:

1. Dog walk animation: the bad doggy doggy's can now walk, so they don't look they're performing in Holiday on ice. Additionally, they can also sit down.
2. Simon run animation: Simon can run! That's handy for avoiding the dogs that can walk now. Everything is in balance, ying & yang :)

Two main difficulties today:

1. A dog walk animation is not easy; all those legs that move at different angles. A human (biped?) animation is easier to do. The book Cartoon Animation written by Preston Blair helped me a lot with this task.
2. Transforming all frames into one texture is stil a pain. Oh my ... it takes too much time:
1. First I need to export every frame (= one layer) in Illustrator to a PNG file that is correctly scaled in the y dimension. So, a down walk frame could be 235 pixels high and a up walk frame could be 245 pixels high.
2. Then one PhotoShop file is created in which all PNG's are pasted. That file should never be bigger than 2048x2048 pixels since some video cards will not accept formats above that.
3. And finally, an XML configuration needs to be created/editerd with information about every frame for a particular figure's animation. An example of such an XML file is given below; it's the configuration file of the Dog.

I wonder if the XNA video playback support would also allow me to play animations? I guess there will not be granular control of the animation ... will try it out when there is some time. Additionally, the bounding box will then be static; now it grows and shrinks with every played frame.

Here are the textures that have been drawn today: