skeletor - a skeleton animation system for Love2D

[pel]

Hi guys,

I cleaned up a skeletal animation system I had started for Love2D a few years ago.

I didn't really explore other skeletal animation systems for Love2D, so I'm not really sure how mine differs.

There are still a few features I want to implement. Perhaps in the following weeks. I need to implement a way to morph from one skeleton setup to another in a given amount of steps. I also want to add textures. And a few other things as well.

I'd love to make a simple game with this!

A few features:
- There is a simple boundary system that creates a box around the skeleton for collision detection.
- Skeletons and bones are created using a system with paths. Very simple.

skeleton lives on github and is pretty well documented. You can run the main.lua file in the repo for a quick demo.

https://github.com/pelevesque/skeletor

[portify]

Looks pretty nice. Though, if I may ask, why the "name" arguments to functions rather than returning skeleton/bone objects that you can work with directly? So, instead of:

Code: Select all

skeletor:newSkeleton('jane', {
    x = 200,
    y = 200
})
print(skeletor:getSkeletonProp('jane', 'x'))
skeletor:deleteSkeleton('jane')

You'd do this:

Code: Select all

local jane = skeletor:newSkeleton({     -- could even use skeletor:newSkeleton { ... } style here
    x = 200,
    y = 200
})
print(jane.x)

[pel]

Thank you for the interest and advice.

I coded this awhile back, and now you have me thinking!

The original idea was so that I could have many skeletons and the system would take care of them internally. Another feature I want to have is grouping.

Your ideas simplifies things and makes editing one skeleton easier... But, I'm guess you have to organize skeletons, etc... somehow? You're essentially proposing to do that outside the class - on your own - instead of having the class take care of that?

Code: Select all

skeletor:newSkeleton('mary', {x = 0, y = 0})
skeletor:newBone('mary.foot', {length = 100})
skeletor:newSkeleton('jane', {x = 300, y = 300})
skeletor:newBone('jane.toe', {length = 300})
skeletor:cloneSkeleton('jane', 'tim')
skeletor:newBone('tim.hand', {length = 100})
skeletor:editSkeleton('tim', {x = 400, y = 600, sx = 2})

-- then drawing is easy
love function.draw()
    skeleton:draw()
end

How would you add bones?

How would you draw the skeletons? I guess once you created many skeletons, you would have to feed them all to the draw function to tell the system which ones to draw?

[pel]

BTW - I forgot to write this in the documentation.

You can use the skeletons object at anytime like so

Code: Select all

skeletor:newSkeleton('max', {x = 10, y = 10})

-- retrieve the x property of the max skeleton
skeletor.skeletons['max'].x

-- instead of using the documented
skeletor:getSkeletonProp('max', 'x')