Catalin on 2D Skeletal Animations
Catalin “Too Proud To Self-promote” Zima (you might know him as our local XNA MVP Captain ZSquare) has a nice write-up of 2D Skeletal Animations over at his blog. So, if you ever wondered what the benefits of skeletal animations in the 2D world as compared to our beloved sprite sheets are, his post would be your starting point to explore this very topic.
Nuclex Framework, Community Character Voting and Morph Targets
Markus “Cygon4” Ewald announces the immediate availability of an intermediate release of his Nuclex Framework, adding: “There are still outstanding issues, but the previous release is already getting a beard and I'm getting reports for issues already solved
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Amit Ginni Patpatia of FatCow Games AS fame reminds the community to vote for a character for an upcoming game.
Last but not least Barnaby Smith pokes me about an XNA 3.1 Morph Target implementation he put online: “This example uses multiple vertex streams and blends between them using a vertex shader. This approach is a differing method to CPU or VTF based implementations and does not require the calculation of vertex textures, making it quite simple and straightforward.
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Article: I Can Has Platformer? (Part 3)
by Casey Young
Welcome back to the third part of my series on how to create a simple platformer game. In this article I take you on a little journey in making our hero animated.
KiloWatt Animation for XNA
Jwatte has tweeted news prediction of a new version of his KiloWatt animation library and Pre-release bits are here.
"This is the third-and-a-half release of the KiloWatt Animation library. It is intended as a companion to the kW X-port 3ds Max X file exporter, to be used with Microsoft XNA Game Studio. This release is for version 3.0/3.1 for Windows and Xbox 360. Sorry, no Zune support "
He goes on to explain how this is different to the XNA Skinning sample on the creators website
The KiloWatt Animation Library is different from the XNA Skinning sample code in several ways, including:
- KiloWatt Animation stores animation keyframes as position, rotation and scale (for a total of 10 floats), instead of the full matrix used by the Animation Components.
- KiloWatt Animation removes unnecessary keyframes (down to a tolerance that you can specify), for a usually quite significant savings in file size.
- KiloWatt Animation does interpolation between animation keyframes using quaternions, which means that slow-motion and varispeed playback will still look smooth.
- KiloWatt Animation supports composition (blending) of animations to generate the final output pose for a given Model.
- KiloWatt Animation replaces the Effect used for your Model only when you tell it to.
- KiloWatt Animation does not make any specific demands of your geometry; you can (and should) use it to animate rigid objects such as windmills, catapults etc. in addition to skinned meshes.
sgMotion v1.0.0 Released
Tom Looman released his sgMotion library to CodePlex. Says Tom:
sgMotion is an animation library (based on XNAnimation by Bruno Evangelista) and provides full integration with both the Sunburn Engine and the Sunburn Framework.
More at the source.