Lightweight AnimatedImage Library

Development Discussion
#1

Thought some folks here might find this little library I wrote helpful.

animatedimage.zip (102.0 KB)

The goal of AnimatedImage is to be able to plop in animated images in place of static images easily. No calls to update, etc. In fact, AnimatedImage behaves just like a built-in playdate.graphics.image. Any API playdate.graphics.image supports so does AnimatedImage, except it operates on the current frame. It does this by forwarding any call to the current frame image. It is more or less a drop-in replacement.

AnimatedImage is less than 100 lines of Lua, and most of that is just boilerplate getter/setter as AnimatedImage sits on top of playdate.graphics.image and playdate.graphics.animation.loop. Simply replace playdate.graphics.image.new with AnimatedImage.new to get started, and change the path from a static image to that of an image table or gif.

animated-image

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#2

Since it does rely on animation.loop is there any requirements to add timer updates etc to the main playdate.update loop?

i.e. is it really as simple as just switch the underlying class? or is there more, like sprites.

#3

Yeah the example is dead simple. No special calls to update etc. it’ll just draw the right frame. You can pause the animation and set the frame manually to draw a specific frame.

It forwards most calls to the current frame image so it for all purposes behaves like an image.

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#4

very cool! thank you for this.

#5

Kinda feel like image objects should just support animations seamlessly so if the path is an Image Table or gif, it works like this. With perhaps an isAnimated property, and a few animation specific functions like pause and setAnimationFrame. :man_shrugging:

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#6

Love this! Thank you!

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#7

Plopped this on GitHub: GitHub - mierau/playdate-animatedimage: A dead simple way lightweight way to display animated images/gifs in your Playdate game.

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#8

Curious if you've seen performance boosts from dropping this in? Or is it mostly to simplify the use of animated images?

#9

Haven’t checked, though it wasn’t built as an optimization nor do I think it would be. It’s purely meant for convenience. You don’t want to manage a timer object, an image table. Perhaps you just want to quickly test an animation where you currently have a static image. I find this helpful in those situations.

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#10

Totally. The less timers I have to think about, the better probably :grimacing:

#11

This is great, thanks Dustin.

Not sure if this is outside the scope of your library, but I've added an extra option to allow animation frames to be drawn out-of-order. Handy for sprite sheets that contain a variety of different movements/actions.

It goes right before local animation_loop = ...

	if options.sequence ~= nil then
		local temp_imagetable = graphics.imagetable.new(#options.sequence)
		for i, v in ipairs(options.sequence) do
			temp_imagetable:setImage(i, image_table:getImage(v))
		end
		image_table = temp_imagetable
	end
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#12

Hey that's a nice addition. I'll look into adding it!

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#13

Also handy:

function AnimatedImage:getImage()
	return self.image_table:getImage(self.loop.frame)
end

I’ve got my modified version here:

I’m really not sure about etiquette when it comes to stuff like this. Would you prefer I call it something else if it’s public?