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
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:
- What time interval granularity should I allow the user when setting these notifications?
- 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.