[Paper 2D] Animation Notification System

Hey,

So i recently started working on an animation notification system for the Paper 2D plugin and wanted to share what my ideas are for such a system and hopefully get your feedback :slight_smile:

So the idea is that a developer opens up the Flipbook editor and is able to right click on the timeline and “Add an animation notification”
A dialogue box will then prompt them to give this notification a name (lets assume they entered “JumpApex”). The flipbook will then keep a mapping between the position that the notification was mapped to (more on what I mean by position later)
The programmer would then call a function in their C++ code to bind a function to this notification e.g:
MyFlipbook.BindNotification(“JumpApex”, MyFunctionCallback);
The flip book will then trigger MyFunctionCallback when it reaches the position that “JumpApex” was bound to.

This was the programmer and the animator can maintain a certain level of separation where the programmer doesn’t need to know at which frame JumpApex occurs they just need to know that the person working with the flipbook has created a notification (ofc there will be error checking :P)
This also behaves the same way engine input is bound to player characters!

Now comes 2 sticking points for me:

  1. What time interval granularity should I allow the user when setting these notifications?
  2. Should the the animation events show up on a track than the animation track?

As for point one, right now im planing on having the granularity of a key frame through would love to hear what you think (Simply because its easier to implement and I think it makes the most sense)

For the second point I honestly couldn’t tell you. Bellow is an image showing the work I have done to try to get a separate track to display the animation notifier events. The alternative would be a separate “handle bar thing” on the main track to denote animation notifications (I used paint to draw it in blue :P)

Any feedback will be greatly appreciated.

Hi,

For point 1 I usually make it per frame, it’s a common method for flipbook animations. It would be someting like:



---> Timeline --->
1 ----- 2 ----- 3
|               |
event1          event3


And yes they should show up and the animator should be able to modify the events name too.

Cheers,
Moss

The, granularity of assigning events at the frame level is doable, but its more difficult since flip books store stuff in terms of keyframes.

Also with regards to the animation notifiers being on separate tracks, does anyone know which source code the Animation Editors animation notify’s are? I would love it if i could sync the styles so that my system doesn’t look completely out of style.

Finally, what do you think about having:
A) Multiple Bindings / Event?
B) Multiple Events / Frame?

wow this is what ive been waiting for, im very excited for this.

Glad to hear that people are finally extending Paper2D.

Do you plan to open source the plugin?

Have you made any progress on this? I would like to use a notify system by sprite in a flipbook. Do you have code to share? I would really appreciate it!