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For work-related reasons I have been using the Unity engine for the last few months. There are some things I like: it is incredibly easy to set up something and view it live with a few clicks. The editor is very powerful and it is something that I would really like to have for my engine. However, being an incredibly stubborn developer, Unity is not something that I can feel as being "mine", so I'd rather spend twice as much time (or even more) to build my own engine.
This brings us to the matter at hand. My engine does not (yet?) have a visual editor with which I can script animations and preview them. As you may recall, I implemented animation features for my UI library. I have extended that system to the rest of my Entity-Component-System framework. Using my xml-like language is the next-best thing, if compared to actually writing the code necessary to create the animation objects from scratch. Instead, I can define them with a few lines and the parser will take care of orchestrating everything. I have thus created a Cutscene class that is able to animate all entities in the Scene and is also able to reference other hardcoded animations such as those belonging to UI controls. I need these animation features for two main reasons: first, I'm working on an "announcement" trailer of sorts and second, once I move to the actual ship-to-ship combat part of the game, once you issue an order, it will be visually shown by a contextual cutscene, similar to the way it happens in the recent X-Com game. Here is an example of the Cutscene animation shown in the above video.
[code=xml:0]
The top-level object in my ECS is the Scene, an object containing all entities in the game world. As such it implements an interface that is able to return individual entities by name. So when the parser finds a string value in the TargetName attribute it asks the Scene object to return the correct entity. If the value is in array syntax, the Entity object (which implements the same interface as well) will return the component specified as the index of the array. This can go on for more layers as it can be observed from the boolean curves targeting UI elements. Overlay is the UI entity, while UserInterface is the actual UI component holding a reference to the GUI object; the third index is the name of the individual UI control being referenced. I have also implemented a few functions to avoid generating individual keyframes to approximate some effects, such as the SquareWave function that animates the flickering of the target brackets.
Finally, the Commands section references other animations that are defined elsewhere, either as other cutscenes or as hardcoded animation. In this case those two animations are the built-in animations of the Typewriter effect. This cutscene will activate the first one two seconds into the animation and the other one ten seconds into.
