Woot! I am so excited to be able to finally release this to the public. Panayoti from GamePoetry.com and I have been working hard on this for the past 9 months or so ( on and off ) This was originally sparked off by my reading of his request for help: Improving Performance With Animated Bitmaps. I said to myself, “Hey I’ve basically already done all of this!” So after talking over the vision of the animation system for a while I set out to create a robust and extensible API. It only took a day or so to get the bulk of it coded, however over the last few months we have been using it in projects so that we can test / refine it further. Finally it is to the point that we can both happily release it to you guys!

So without further delay, I now introduce you to Ginger :

Features :

• Extremely fast and optimized animations
• Set the rotation precision, and each frame is pre cached for speed
• Attach an event dispatch to any frame of animation
• Adjustable frame rate
• Set your own offset for each frame of animation
• Queue up multiple animations
• Import Tile sheets and convert to an animation
• *NEW – 9/10/09* Import MovieClips, Sprites, and Bitmaps and convert to an animation

Download the example files from SVN here.
-or-
Download in .ZIP format here.

Future Plans

• Create a real time loader for larger animation files
• Optimizations to rotated animations
• Tools for building animations using XML format
• Tools for loading MovieClips / swfs – Done!
  
• Easy integration with my game framework

During this tutorial I will explain how to set and get started with using Flex, as well as explain some of the not so obvious at first things that go along with it. Watch the first minute or so for an intro and then you can skip to the different parts depending on what help you need (or just watch the whole thing).

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Sweet! It’s ready to go. I have created a custom Input Manager for you to take advantage of. Check out this quick video tutorial that will walk you through how to use it in your projects or feel free to look it over yourself.

You can download the package containing the demos and the files or just grab it directly from the repository on my Google Project Page.

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