Hi everyone, Dodgyville, and others in the past have asked about improved animation control in pyglet. To this end, I have some experimental changes in a branch, and wanted to get feedback before merging it in.
First of all, let me give a quick explaination of how things work now. The `Animation` class itself is simply a holder for `Frame` objects. The `Frame` class is just an image and a duration. That's basically it - Animations don't do anything by themselves. The actual logic for how to Animations are used lies in the `Sprite` class. When assigning an Animation to a Sprite, the Sprite class will schedule an interal update method with `pyglet.clock.schedule_once` to handle advancing the Animation Frames and updating it's own Texture. This works just fine, but there is no real way to control the Animation without bloating the Sprite class with more methods. My changes are this: 1. Make the Animation class an EventDispatcher. 2. Handle scheduling of Frame advancement inside the Animation class. 3. The Animation has a `current_frame` property for getting the current texture. 4. Dispatch "next_frame" and "on_animation_end" events when appropriate. 5. When assigning an Animation to a Sprite, the Sprite will simply subscribe to the events, and update it's Texture when handling the "next_frame" event. What does this do in practice? From an API perspective, nothing has changed. The Sprite class is also still an EventDispatcher, and will re-dispatch the "on_animation_end" event that is passed by the Animation. If you create a ton of Sprites all with different Animations, performance is un-changed. However, if you share the same Animation among lots of sprites, it's about 50% faster in my benchmarks. This speedup is because there is only one `pyglet.clock.schedule` in use, and each Sprite simply has to handle an event. This can by useful in tiled games, that might use the same tiled water animation for example. These changes shouldl also make it easier to add high-level control to any animation. You could add pause, reset, etc. methods to an Animation. One potential downside to these changes is that if you load a lot of Animations, and don't use them, they will still be scheduling fram updates in the background. If this is an issue, it could be mitigated with an "activate" method to starts in going. This would be called automatically when assigning it to a Sprite. Feedback welcome! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "pyglet-users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/pyglet-users. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
