Incognito

For a while now I've been focusing on my job more than anything. I get less time to spend on the computer at home than I have in the past. My job travel time is partly to blame in that it is actually an hour commute so that removes 2 hours a day from actual development time and blog time. Though I have had new responsibilities at home as well. I know there is little excuse for doing a 5 minute post and keeping things going I just hate putting up things that are uninteresting or that don't help you in your game programming and learning.

What's on the Horizon
But I thought I would take a moment to just start writing a few words to console you in your grief over the lack of posts. I am doing a rewrite of the Timed Animation putting splitting it into two or three posts:

• Sprites - basic frame switching 
• Advanced Sprites - collision objects, hotspots, rotations
• Animations - starting/stopping, animations using hotspots, maybe automated reactions to triggers

I want the code to be a abstract and loosely coupled with the Java standard APIs so that they can easily be ported to Android or Java mobile APIs if anyone uses those anymore. The concepts are pretty simple, each sprite has a number of frames including the current frame. The rendering method and asset type (images basically) should be a bit abstracted away in order to allow for it to be extended to and reused in different types of situations such as using a Shape instead of an image or using some other custom type of renderable object.

This concludes the 5 minute update, any suggestions for things you'd like to see on here please don't hesitate to comment with what you'd like to see. I am always open to suggestions. Thanks