Development Blog

This is available on the beta branch now.

I prefer the Lua version since I can modify it to allow a callback on a "special" frame that I set or on every frame if I want to allow me to do certain things. Usually for an attack animation on the frame that would hit the target playing particles and doing damage to perhaps rainbow out in text. I've done playing footstep sounds when the feet would hit the floor. This sort of limits that. I'll just pull that script and continue using it but this version is more limiting in that respect.

 

Is EndDeath a global function in Lua or a script function like we had it with the old animation manager?

 

So you're taking away the entity draw callback? That kind of screws over using the old animation manager for its flexibility then right?

EndDeath, in the example above, would be an entity script function, just like before. The object itself does not have to be passed to the function since the entity already is associated with the Lua table.

The animation manager only updates when the entity is drawn, so this does away with the most common use of the entity draw hook.

 

Can you keep the draw hook please? If not then letting us define any number of callbacks at any point in the animation would be ideal. You could just make a function named AddAnimationCallback(callbackName, frame). Then if we set -1 to the frame param it means the end of the animation, otherwise it means the actual frame of the animation to call.

Once something is in the API and released, it doesn't go away. Of course the existing method will remain.

 

In a future engine the renderer might be running on a separate thread, and a draw hook could become impractical in that kind of design. But that would be a new engine, not the existing one.

Yeah, you shouldn't need to call another script, or code a whole class just to do basic animations. When I was new to Leadwerks, I didn't understand why the default SetAnimation command didn't just work. But I understand cases where you might want the older system yourself though.

 

I'm glad I was able to contribute to the engine. I was actually gonna expose this myself, but I was still getting bugs with my code with looping animations. (Although I was the only one getting them!). Didn't see any issues with the existing code though!

 

 

In a future engine the renderer might be running on a separate thread, and a draw hook could become impractical in that kind of design. But that would be a new engine, not the existing one.

 

New engine? Or you mean when you revamp the engine for Vulkan?

New engine? Or you mean when you revamp the engine for Vulkan?

Well, I'm never going to write a new engine from scratch but Vulkan support or a major architecture change would be a new engine basically.

Since this has not been put on the release branch yet, I am renaming the command "SetAnimation" to "PlayAnimation".

Ok, that sounds better.