Hey guys, I need to do some sprite animation. Rather than manually making a bunch of numbered source images that my sprite can animate through in my data folder, I want to have a single sprite sheet for each type of sprite.

When I draw the sprites, I obviously don't want to render the entire sprite sheet. I want to render small pieces of it.

I want to be able to draw a small piece of my sprite sheet each frame by specifying a source rectangle from the sprite sheet. That way, to animate a sprite, I would simply move the rectangle across the sprite sheet that I'm drawing from rather than manually making a series of image files and changing the image I display each frame.

Is this possible?

 OK... I guess you probably want to know how too

PImage.get() is one option, though apparently a little slower than accessing the PImage pixels array directly.

Although not linked from Processing I have created a sprite library which will do what you want and a lot more.

You might like to try it out
http://www.lagers.org.uk/s4p/index.html

Once you download the zip file you need to unzip it into the Processing/libraries folder.

If you get it right then inside Processing/libraries there will be a folder called
sprites and inside this there will be 4 folders called

examples
library
reference
src


All these are necessary to get the best out of the library, in particular the reference folder contains the library documentation in HTML format (double click on index.html to start it in a browser. The sprites.jar file is in the library folder and there it should stay.

Once this is done you should start/restart Processing and to see the examples select
File | Sketchbook | libraries | sprites | examples and then take your pick.

The lbrary has a lot of features so there is a lot to learn but I think you will find it worth the effort and save you a lot of low level coding.

Hope this helps

Is there a more appropriate place than this where I can ask questions about your library? I have a couple of questions.

I have a found a sprite sheet that I'm going to use for my assignment. It's background is that typical hot pink color, so I would like to somehow tell your library "this color pink needs to be transparent". I'd rather not have to make a gray scale alpha mask for every sprite sheet that I download.

Also, a lot of sprite sheets aren't simply rows and columns. A lot have text. For those, will I need to manually make take out the rows and columns that I need?


*edit*
ok I think I answered my own questions. Its probably better to do some manual work with sprite sheets that I download rather than trying to automate it all. I'm just converting my sprite sheets to .PNGs and converting their pink backgrounds to alpha in GIMP. Then I'm just cutting out the rows I need. That's probably easier than trying to code in the coordinates of where I want to start animation frames.

However, I'd still like to know if there's a more appropriate place to ask questions about your sprite library  .