Animations

Animating is one of the many things that Pyglet makes it easy to do. Just recently Erik drew a fabulous sprite sequence for the cell, and I spent some time today integrating it into our game.

If this weren't just a screenshot you'd see this cell moving and animated.

Pyglet has helper functions for breaking a grid of images up into different textures, and this is the route we took. Erik drew one picture file with a bunch of different sprites in it in a grid pattern, and then I used pyglet.image's ImageGrid class to split it up. The ImageGrid isn't displayable by itself (unless you want to display the whole grid at once, I guess) but it'll return a TextureSequence, which is basically a list of textures. Then I just keep track of how long the current frame's been up on the screen, and change the frame (increase the index into the TextureSequence) when it's been long enough.

My next plan in terms of animation is to make animations seamlessly integrate into anything that calls for a texture. If I make a wrapper class around Texture, and then have the actual texture itself be hidden within a property, I can selectively return the correct texture whenever an object tries to draw. Most things don't need to animate, though, so that's not a really high-priority task.