Animation Plugin

[Freshmilkymilk]

Allow for animation of a set of blocks such as doors, boats, etc.

[dags-]

Thoughts:

Components:

• Animation triggers - one or more event listeners that cause the animation to play
• Animation frames - the stop-motion frames that are pasted into the world at set intervals to create the top-motion style animation

Requirements:

• File storage format for animation frames
• File storage format for triggers
• Animation types
• Interactable triggers
• Smart loading, caching and unloading of triggers and frames

Frame storage format

Sponge will have a schematic format built in. Not sure if this is targetting api 4.x (1.8.9) or if it'll be in later versions

Trigger storage format

Something light-weight - json would probably be fine.
Would contain:

• Activation range - an area within which trigger listeners would actually trigger for a user's actions
• Paste reference point - the point from which frames should be pasted relative to
• List of Listeners (support AND/OR behavior?)
• List of animations that should play
• ?

Animation types

Support different types of animation:

• Basic - play a queue of frames in order (doors etc)
  • Replace-all mode - entire volume of frame pasted in
  • Replace-some mode - only non-air blocks pasted in/replaced
• Point-to-point - a single frame that travels between two points (boats, portcullis, etc)
• ?

Should support looping and playing in reverse

Triggers

• Listen to user clicks on blocks/areas
• Listen to user chat for keywords
• ?

Triggers should be location specific, and would be linked to one or more animations.
When a user is within x range of a trigger, the animation should be loaded from disk and stored in memory ready to play, until no users are within range.

Need to also consider how a trigger behaves when fired during an actively playing animation - ie is it ignored, does it stop the animation, does it reset the animation etc

Caching

Would be a waist of memory to keep all animations loaded all the time. Should consider loading, caching, and then removing animations as needed - don't want to overly rely on io though

Notes

• Sponge World extends the Viewer interface, meaning 'fake' block changes can be sent via the sendBlockChange(..) method. These changes are client-side only (don't actually get saved), so it shouldn't be a problem if an animation is interrupted by a crash/restart

[Freshmilkymilk]

This has been completed:

https://github.com/dags-/StopMotion https://github.com/ArdaCraft/DoorsOfDurin