EditorView

View Editor

Views

In the view editor you add sprites from the Sprite Manager to animation strips called Loops. This way you create the walkcycles for your Character as well as all other character animations. Also you define the animation for object on screen you want to animate with Loops inside a View.

You can have 4 or 8 Loops for different directions for walking views. This means your character can either walk left, right, up and down with 4 Loops or you add 4 additional directional walkcycles for diagonal movement. Usually 4 directions are more than enough to animate but no one is stopping you from going all the way. You set the 4/8 directions walking animation per character in the Character Editor. Animation flipping is also possible but for that see the Right Click Context Menu entry.

It is good practice to use a new loop for every character and also for special character animations.
You can add a lot of object animations to one single view, but you could for example sort them by game chapters (one view for every chapter) to make it easier for you to find them again. You can name the View with a right-click on the View in the game explorer.

Don't worry about overloading AGS, with the newer versions you can have unlimited views, unlimited loops per view and unlimited frames per loop.

Right Click Context Menu

When you right-click on a single frame in a loop you get the following options:

• Flip frame

  Flips a single frame.

• Delete frame

  Remove that single frame

• Insert frame before this

  Useful when you added your animation and forgot first frame was the idle frame.

• Insert frame after this

  Inserts a frame after the one you right clicked.

• Cut loop

  Good for moving things around when you did everything right in the wrong loop.

• Copy loop

  Copies an entire loop!

• Paste over this loop

  You need this to place the loop after you copied it.

• Paste over this loop flipped

  If you have copied the loop with the character going right, make him go to left!

• Flip all frames in loop

  You already did the character going right and pasted on this loop, then use this option!

• Add all sprites from folder

  On the sprite manager, if you have all the sprites to be used in a loop, ordered, in a folder, you can use this option to quickly added them. This is useful when you have many frames.

Show Preview

When you tick the checkbox above the Loops called Show Preview you get to see a preview of the animation of course. It is located to the left of the list of Loops and you can either manually browse through all the frames of the Loop or you check the animate checkbox to see it in motion.

The Skip Frame 0 (standing Frame) Checkbox does exactly that, it skips Frame 0 for the preview animation. This is only important for previews for views that are used as walking views for a character.
When you animate a game object or you want the character to animate different from walking (like picking up an Inventory Item) Frame 0 is always included in the animation. When the view is used as a walking view Frame 0 is skipped for the animation until the character reaches the endpoint of the walk and stops there. Then Frame 0 is displayed all the time in the direction the character is facing when he stopped walking.

Properties

Delay
With the delay setting you delay the displaytime of the one selected frame only by that amount. This delay is in game frames, so, how long the delay is in time depends on the frames per second your game is running on. You can check the game-speed for easy debugging with GetGameSpeed. In your start function you can even set the FPS with SetGameSpeed. By default AGS games run at 40 FPS. This delay value is specific to one frame only. And you can slow down the whole animation with the Delay value of the Animate function. This frame delay is added to the overall loop delay.

Flipped
You flip that one frame with that property. Very useful for mirrored animations like in walkcycles for left and right walk. Don't have a character with a cane then. Please note you can also flip the whole loop and not only a single frame within the Right Click Context Menu.

Image
The image number AGS gives your image imported into the Sprite Manager. This selected frame has exactly this image number.

ID
Greyed out. Should be the frame number for the selected frame.

Sound
Play the sound set here every time the animation loop plays and reaches this frame.
Useful for footsteps and all other sounds needed for object animations.