Could there ever be a specific animation API?

[kicknbritt]

Just curious, would there ever be a chance of implementing animation into love2d's api?
Like maybe love.graphics.Animate()
or love.graphics.drawAnimation(Animation) ?
I feel like it would be alot easier than external libs or handcoding it.
And if not, could someone explain why? Thanks.

[zorg]

There was an animation API early on, in 0.2, and removed in 0.6; this is one of those things that people tend to implement for themselves, or release that as a lib for others. Also, there are many kinds of animation, simple frame-based, skeletal, bezier curve based, etc. (and maybe libs for each kind as well; i know of Anim8 for the first kind, and i recall a skeletal animation lib too, not sure about curve based ones though)

https://love2d.org/forums/viewtopic.php ... ved#p29330
https://love2d.org/forums/viewtopic.php ... ved#p72861
https://love2d.org/forums/viewtopic.php ... ed#p109491

Oops, I meant to reply to this, but forgot...

Anyway, it was removed with the introduction of Quads, along the lines of "you now have everything to make them yourself, make them yourself", and I, at the time, made a complete implementation of the old API, and named it AnAL. Do note that it has gone without changes for a long time, because the API still matches the old one, and I intend to keep it that way, that said, if it breaks, I intend to fix it.

One of the reasons love tends to follow this trend (of giving you the tools to make things, instead of the things itself) is because it means that people can make their own version according to their own needs, and if they don't want to make their own, there's probably a bunch of libraries for it already, from which you can pick the one you like most.

That said, wrt animations, it seems most people roll their own, but of course there's also kikito's anim8, which provides a completely different API (last I checked), which is exactly what this is all about!

[raidho36]

GameMaker has animation system and for most applications it's just not sufficient, people do their own animation programming and don't use the built-in system. One reason is because it's simple enough to display animation: just change the picture over time. Other reason is that no matter how extensive the built-in system is, there is always something you want to do with it that it doesn't supports, and then you need to write your own thing and the built-in system becomes useless.

[kicknbritt]

I understand. Maybe it's also the less restrictive nature of the Lua language that helps contribute the more decentralized approach. Speaking of animation, is the skeletal animation library we have usable for actual games? I checked it out but all I saw was a bendy straw looking skeleton lol.

[coffeecat]

It's important to have commonly used component like skeletal animation available, either in LOVE itself or as a library. Otherwise, it would be mostly a boilerplate for each game to write, and impose a higher barrier to make use of such common technology in a LOVE game. It's a challenge to do a good design for skeletal animation though, because a skeletal animation library alone won't make sense without an accompanying graphical editor.

[raidho36]

One would expect to write skeletal animaiton library for existing software, not the other way around.