CopperCube 2D Animations Scripts

On advice from a person at Ambiera forums, I decided to put these scripts as a separate package from the Coppercube 2D Controllers Pack as this is part of that package.

These scripts are super helpful and ease the workflow of creating 2D  games and animations in the Coppercube 3D game engine. You can see the video on the top right to get an overview and usage instructions of the extensions and plugins that come in the package.

The package has the following contents:-

A  Plugin  "Create 2D Animation" shortcut (Ctrl+Shift+2) that will create a new scene node in the scenegraph explorer with the name specified. The animation name provided to the plugin must be unique. This plugin can also be used with Animate External Textures behavior as it embeds all the textures in the exe, and you don't have to give textures along with the exe files.

A Behavior "Set 2D Animation", allows us to initialize the animation or set a default animation for the scene node. The animation here is the scene node that gets created with the help of the plugin that comes with the package.

An Action "Set 2D animation of a scenenode" that allows us to switch or change the animations of a scene node at different events just like we do for 3D animations.  Here animations are the scene nodes that get created with the help of the plugin that comes with the package.

A batch script "sequentialFileNameCleaner", removes parenthesis from the name of files in Windows. Comes in handy when renaming multiple files in Windows. (This file has been removed since the new update) as the new plugin auto includes the batch renaming scheme of the Windows system with brackets (n).

Features of the plugin V1.2:-

• Allows you to create 2D animations in just a few clicks.
• Proper warnings and alerts in the editor to avoid bugs and errors.

Features of the behavior:-

Allows to set an initial animation to a node with various properties like:-

• Affecting material:- you can specify on which material of the object you want to apply the animation, multiple materials can be specified and separated by a comma.
• Time per frame:- this allows you to control the speed of the animation.
• Looping:- This boolean allows you to select whether the animation should be looped or played once only.

Features of the action:-

Allows you to set/change the 2D animation already playing on a scene node with a bunch of properties like:-

• Affecting node:- This allows you to select the node whose animation you want to change.
• Animation:- this is the new animation that you want to play on the scene node.
• Affecting material:- this is going to be the material index separated by commas, on which you want to play the animations.
• Time_per_frame:- This allows you to control the speed of the new animation.
• Looping:- This allows you to change if you want to play the animation once or in a loop.
• Action on start:- Allows you to execute the action, when the animation starts playing.
• Action on 1 animation cycle:- Allows you to execute the animation on one complete animation cycle. 
• Action on Specific Frame:- Allows you to execute actions on specific frames.
• Animation Mode:- Different Animation modes, allow you to control the animation style, like reverse, ping-pong, and more.

The animation can be applied to 2D overlays, Billboards, and 3D objects as well.

The project pack is currently being updated with new features, so some of the above-mentioned features are in development. While most of them have been already developed.

The plugin has been updated with the latest version while the action and behavior still use the previous version, from the Coppercube 2D Controllers Pack.

A new video once the update of action and behavior is done, is planned to showcase the new features and their usage.

Update v1.2 : The plugin has been heavily updated, so it won't go as described in the tutorial video. Below are the major changes to the plugin.

• Changed the shortcut keys to Ctrl+Shift+2, instead of shift+2, so that it won't stop you from writing in the editor.
• Modified the plugin, so that it captures the selected image formats only (even if there are other files or folders in the directory)  previously it was capturing all the other files as well, breaking the plugin & failing in the creation of animation.
• Uses Frame() to load the animation frames, instead of "frame1", "frame2", "frame3" and so on. No need to use the batch file script to remove the braces from the name.
• Prevent the plugin from creating an animation node, if textures are not using the correct naming scheme, and alert the user with an exact frame that is not having the correct name.
• Prevent the creation of animation, if the animation name is not unique and alert the user for the same.
•  Added more detailed Alerts to show errors, causes, and their resolution.
• Fixed a bug that was preventing the animation creation, if there were whitespaces in the folder name of animation frames