Aaron’s Head is now Animated

I’m learning that programming as a novice is a whole lot of trial and error, with an akward learning curve.

Today I managed to get my moving sprite animated; if it’s moving right it looks right. If it’s moving left, it looks left. I also got it open and close the mouth from a space bar press! The path to getting there however, was a long one…

I started out trying to switch the filename associated with a Texture2D object. This, simply put, did not work. My theory was to simply change out the file name based on keyboard presses, hoping this would inpact the Draw class. It didn’t.

So… I began a treck of many trials and errors, and many Google searches. I found a tutorial called “How to Animate a Sprite” in the XNA help documents. Excited, I tried and tried for about 2 hours to understand what was happening in the AnimateSprite class they created, so I could pull out and modify the neccessary code. What I couldn’t wrap my head around was the class was asking for some frames arguments, and then dividing the width by the number of frames.

I tried to find any references to frames in the C# documents (in Java they’re called the JavcaDoc; what are they in C#?). But couldn’t figure it out… so I went on in faith. I decided they must have meant use an animated GIF, so I did. And worked, and thought, and finally, started from scratch.

At which point I finally read the opening sentances of the XNA Tutorial – they expect you to be using one image that is a strip of frames, all of equal size. Now it all made sense… but I didn’t want to do it that way.

So, I ended up loading 4 images (i.e. myTextureF1 = Texture2D.FromFile(graphics.GraphicsDevice, “aaronRightOpen”)) and the setting up an int Frame. I then used the keyboard states to set what number should be assigned to the Frame. Finally, in the Draw class, I determined what sprite should be drawn by using if/else statements based on the frame number.

THe thing I’m learning about programming is that sometimes things work. I know, looking at my code, that it’s not clean and not the best way of doing it. But now that I know one way to do it, I can try to find some design patterns that make better sense and more effective use of code.

Never-the-less, I feel accomplished. I had a goal and I’ve gotten there, step by step, and I know how I did it.