Animation

An animation handler is decently hard to write, especially when working with objects instead of directly with sprites, so I opted to use the Thor library. It has some great tools and tutorials. I think I'll also use the action handling component of Thor in the future, but for now I'm just using the Animation component.

Before this, I manually moved the sprite's position every time I pressed an arrow key. It looked something like

case sf::Event::KeyPressed:
    {
    if(sf::Keyboard::isKeyPressed(sf::Keyboard::Down)){
        if(y < 600)
            y += 5;
        playerSprite.setTexture(this->textureManager.getRef("down"));
    }

    ...(add other directions here)

}

playerSprite.setPosition(x, y);

As you can see, there is a lot that can go wrong here, and animation without some sort of counter and change to how I handled textures was going to be hard and tedious. But Thor's animation makes this much easier. First you load the animations

Thor::FrameAnimation playerDown;
Thor::Animator animator;

loadAnimations() {
        playerDown.addFrame(1.f, sf::IntRect(0, 0, 400, 600));
    playerDown.addFrame(1.f, sf::IntRect(400, 0, 400 ,600));
        playerDown.addFrame(1.f, sf::IntRect(800, 0, 400, 600));
    playerDown.addFrame(1.f, sf::IntRect(1200, 0, 400, 600));
    animator.addAnimation("down", playerDown, sf::seconds(1.f));
}

We use an animator from Thor to keep track of all the animations we need, with a reference by a string similar to how the texture manager works, and a duration. Now our input handling block will play the animation

case sf::Event::KeyPressed:
    {
        if(sf::Keyboard::isKeyPressed(sf::Keyboard::Down)){
            if(y < 600)
                y += 5;
            animator.playAnimation("down");
        }

        ...(add other directions here)

    }

    playerSprite.setPosition(x, y);
animator.update(clock.restart());
animator.animate(playerSprite);

And that's all there is to get the animations I need for player movement as of now. Once we load the frames we want played and ensure the clock gets restarted, we just need to set the animation we want, and tell the animator to handle it, and Thor takes care of it all for us. This is essentially what I wanted my animation handler to do, but Thor did it much more elegantly and efficiently than I could.

After adding this in, I saw a glaring flaw in the input handling: manually manipulating the sprite position does not scale. Time to implement an entity-component system.