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FlatRedBall XNA/Mono Engine Implementation


Domenic

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I just finished and released a beta build of my Spriter implementation that integrates into the FlatRedBall engine!

It supports linear interpolation only at the moment, but has full bone & sprite animation support.

Code can be found here: https://github.com/kainazzzo/flatredball-spriter

FlatRedBall has a development kit with a tool called Glue, which I have developed a plugin for as part of this project. The Glue tool is a project structure and code generation tool that adds a substantial productivity boost to game development. Glue has a plugin system, and in this particular plugin, I am able to define a custom type that Glue understands: SpriterObject and SpriterObjectSave. The save file handles deserializing the SCML format into object form, and has a conversion routine which converts the SCML objects into something that makes more sense for a runtime object.

The runtime library is extending the engine's built in PositionedObject (and derived type Sprite) to provide ScaledPositionedObject and ScaledSprite, which allows me to connect objects, give them relative values defined in Spriter, and based on the parent chain, absolute values are calculated. Due to this architecture, the main runtime object is scaleable, rotatable, and positionable within 3D space, with all animated child objects being positioned/scaled/rotated relative to the main SpriterObject.

I am still working on a tutorial, and there is much left to do in both the Spriter end of things (collisions & sound effects, as well as other interpolation types, multiple entity support), as well as on the FRB side. I am, however, extremely happy with it and wanted to share! http://www.gluevault.com/plug/79-spriter-integration-plugin

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Thank you! I have to admit there were a lot of curses directed towards you guys along the way.

You can brush them off if they ever get to you, because I'm past the bulk of my headaches :D

The tool is great and is going to be so amazing when you finally release. I bought in as an early adopter even though I am not even close to being an artist. I just want to have all the features available for implementing this plugin.

My only gripe at this point would be the documentation. In my opinion, the PDF that you had back in a2 did so much more for me than the current attempt at dynamically combining code, xml and docs. The graphic that explained how to traverse the timelines and all was a great help, but because it wasn't up to date, I couldn't use it past a certain point.

Anyway, keep up the good work, and thank you for staying active on the forums.

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Hi Domenic,

I'm glad you made it through. Sadly an unavoidible condition of software development is doccumentation is always the last to be finished and perfected. (because you can't write about something that is not yet fully designed or working and because debugging, performance improvements and finishing the intitial feature list by necessity take higher priority)

I certianly hope that if you had asked us any questions when you ran into issues or when our doccumentation was inadequate that we responded quickly and with good information. Was this not the case?

cheers,

Mike at BrashMonkey

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Hi Domenic,

I'm glad you made it through. Sadly an unavoidible condition of software development is doccumentation is always the last to be finished and perfected. (because you can't write about something that is not yet fully designed or working and because debugging, performance improvements and finishing the intitial feature list by necessity take higher priority)

I certianly hope that if you had asked us any questions when you ran into issues or when our doccumentation was inadequate that we responded quickly and with good information. Was this not the case?

cheers,

Mike at BrashMonkey

You did fine answering my questions, thank you :D

I just wanted to convey the fact that I prefer the old documentation style to the new one.

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