Animations and transitions

[alex-moon]

• after landing, play door opening animation, then door opened animation, THEN eject Jack
• before launching, alight Jack, then play door closing animation, then door closed animation
• on clicking asteroid, instead of going to landing straight away, aim the ship at the asteroid and accelerate until hitting landing altitude - THEN initiate landing
• during flight to selected asteroid, user mouse input should be ignored, but if the user hits accelerate or decelerate (or the right mouse button) then the flight should be aborted and mouse control restored

Nice to haves:

• before alighting onto the ship, Jack would ideally walk up the door/ramp and into the ship
• same for disembarking - it would be nice if Jack walked down the ramp
• if Jack's feet aren't touching the ground, it would be nice to have a "falling"/"floating" animation

[alex-moon]

It's clear we need a standard way to animate transforms as well, ie from one position and quaternion to another. The way to do this is to do a helper which stores animations against text keys. You probably put these keys in an enum. You call a method animate(key, positionFrom, quaternionFrom, positionTo, quaternionTo, seconds, delta) and it does the following:

• if no existing animation for that key, it creates a new one and takes the first step - step size is seconds divided by delta - then stores how many seconds have passed by adding delta
• if existing one, simply updates the existing one until seconds has been reached
• if existing one has already ended, do nothing Then you have another method clear(key) which clears the existing or does nothing if no existing.

Question: what if value for seconds changes? Well then I think it updates the target for seconds, right? But the value for seconds is liable to be the same for each key...

Question: could we do landing and launching this way?

Question: we will need to be able to queue these. It seems the animate call will have to return a promise.

[alex-moon]

For detecting when an animation has finished: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42383681/verify-when-a-clipaction-animation-finished-playing-in-three-js