XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 3 - Animation (transforms) - by Peter Kuhn
Animation is a word of Latin origin and means "make alive/bring to live" (animare) or "spirit" (animus). It describes the technique of using a series of single images to create the illusion of movement for the beholder. We all know that concept from the movies and television where the rapid display of a sequence of frames results in the impression of natural motion. In computer graphics and especially games, we use the same technique to bring characters and other elements to life, give the player feedback about their input commands and create a more interesting overall experience. In this article, we'll learn more about animation in general and how it is done in XNA in particular.
Two kinds of animations
When I work with computer games, I like to distinguish between two kinds of animations: transformations and frame-based animation. We have already seen a few glimpses of transformations in the previous parts; when we drew the first sprite onto the screen and moved it around, we have used a translation to create a circular motion in part 1. In part 2 we talked about scaling, which is another simple transformation. These transformations will be part of this article.
The other type of animation that can frequently be found in 2D games is frame-based, which means that the actual content of an element on the screen (i.e. the bitmap that forms the sprite) changes over time. This technique is used when a certain effect cannot be achieved by using the mentioned transformations. For example, imagine a player character that moves its feet when it is walking. There is no way of achieving this animation by applying a transformation or a set of transformations like translations, rotations and scaling to the whole sprite. Instead, you use multiple different images that are shown on the screen in succession to create this animation – just like in a movie. We'll take a deeper look at those animations in the second article about animations.
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Post Contributed by: Kunal Chowdhury
Kunal is the Site Admin and Contributor of Silverlight-Zone. He is a Software Engineer, Microsoft Silverlight MVP, Code Project Mentor and a Code Project MVP. He is also an active Author in SilverlightShow.net and a speaker in various community events. He works on Microsoft Platform and very passionate about Silverlight technology. He started his career in 2007 and achieved various awards during his professional life.
He shares his findings in his personal blog: http://www.kunal-chowdhury.com and he also tweets at: @kunal2383.
