[spoiler=Small rant and reason for creating the topic but has nothing whatsoever to do with the topic.]
Something has been bothering me for a while. Most of the developers that are actively developing something here keep their source code to themselves, hushed up as if they are a commercial company. The only actual open source project active in this community is the Minish Cap Style engine of the Community Project. Sometimes someone posts a topic showing an engine he is creating in which the source is available. But unfortunately these topics are often short lived. Most of the time if any coding is shown, it shows only a small but it does not reveal any of the design and idea behind it. Thus leaving other people whose help is asked guessing whether the fault is in the code or the design. Especially when only 2 lines of code are shown.
Personally, I find this situation for a development community a little suffocating and not helpfull at all. No one learns anything this way. At least not in this community. Also keeping new members who want to learn to develop games away. That is why I decided to try to do something about it by starting discussion topics about how to do specific things. Topics where members can share their ideas, discuss other designs and to learn from each other. I start with this topic about animations using sprites.
[/spoiler]
A few weeks ago I had a discussion with Freki about using a constant image speed in GM would never lead to good animations (
http://www.zfgc.com/forum/index.php?topic=36778.0). I disagree, because with some creativity in sprites you can still create a good animation even with a constant image speed. What I found unfortunate however, was that no alternative solution or implementation was provided. Therefore am I making this discussion about creating animations with sprites.
I am wondering how you guys would design(/program) drawing and animating of sprites. And it does not matter what language you would use. It is not exclusive to GM or C++. Although it would be nice if you could provide some pseudo-code with your explanations.
discuss, discuss, discuss.