EditorView
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 noone is stopping you from going all the way.
Animation flipping is also possible but for that see the Properties entry.
It is good practise 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 rightclick on the View in the game explorer.
! ! ! Add limits of loops or view if there are any left in the engine ! ! !
When you rightclick on a single frame in a loop you get some options someone has to explain now and some I wish someon told me about like Flip All Frames...
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.
