Please, help me be productive.
I'm trying to get a character to walk around, in a platformer. The physics are, so far, not terribly hard, thanks to AppGameKit physics commands. But when it comes to animating the character, eeeesh. I am just completely exhausted, figuring out stuff like how to make sure the location of the pivot point of the lower leg is updated appropriately when an upper leg rotates while walking. (So far I've got the lower limbs moving to the correct place by translation, but not rotating to the correct place. The code is a vast mess, but it's something, I guess.)
I know that if I ever do finish the code, I can reuse it for similar characters. But the same was true for physics -- I could have written code for applying force to move sprites around, etc. Without the AppGameKit physics commands, I'd be exhausted just trying to implement gravity properly, and with the AppGameKit physics commands, that's nearly effortless.
So, can anyone please describe
a typical workflow for doing this type of character animation in AppGameKit Basic?
Do you write your own code for things like updating locations of extremities? What sort of data structure to you use to keep track and update? Am I reinventing wheels? Etc.
I am happy to use other software in combination, preferably free or cheap. Really I just want to know how the pros do this stuff without tearing their hair out.
It's mean time. *averages*
