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Creative Greenfoot: RAW
Creative Greenfoot: RAW

Creative Greenfoot: RAW: Build engaging interactive applications, games, and simulations using Java and Greenfoot

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Creative Greenfoot: RAW

Chapter 2. Animation

 

"Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in."

 
 --Leonardo da Vinci

It is fairly simple to move actors around in Greenfoot scenarios by handling keyboard or mouse events and using setLocation() appropriately. However, we can do better. By animating our actors further, we can breath life into them. We can give our players/users the illusion of a vibrant, living world.

In essence, programming animation is the art of illusion. By adding small movements or image changes at the right time, we beguile our users into believing our creations are more than just static pixels on a screen. In this chapter, you will learn the following techniques for animating Greenfoot actors:

  • Image swapping and movement
  • Timing and synchronization
  • Easing

Greenfoot is a wonderful platform for creating interactive and engaging applications that you can share on the Internet or use as a desktop application. It is your desire to create...

Revisiting Avoider Game

In this chapter, we are going to continue to work on Avoider Game, which we created in Chapter 1, Let's Dive Right in…. If you skipped that chapter, or just prefer to start off with a fresh copy, you can download the code for this game from this book's product page on the Packt Publishing website at http://www.packtpub.com/support. Any concepts I gloss over in this chapter were most likely covered in detail in the previous chapter; be sure to refer to that chapter as needed. Now, open the AvoiderGame scenario in Greenfoot and read on.

Image swapping and movement

Image swapping is the age-old technique for animating. Perhaps as a child, you drew a stick figure in the corner of a pad of paper and slightly changed it on every succeeding page. When you rapidly flipped through the pages, your stick figure came to life. Figure 2 shows my attempt at this type of animation.

Image swapping and movement

Figure 1: This shows old-school stick figure animation

In Greenfoot, we are going to animate actors by rapidly switching between images and achieve the same effect as the paper animation shown in Figure 1. We will learn how to use Greenfoot's setImage() method to do this.

Using setImage()

When we create a new Actor in Greenfoot by subclassing from the Actor class, or one of our subclasses of Actor, Greenfoot prompts us to enter in the name of our new class and to select an image for it. Greenfoot also allows us to dynamically set the image of our Actor objects while the scenario is running, using the method setImage()provided by Greenfoot's Actor class...

Timing and synchronization

Timing is very important in creating realistic animations in Greenfoot. Often, we have the need for an actor to do temporary animation in response to an event. We need a way to allow (or prevent) things for a certain amount of time. It is possible to wait for a specific amount of time using the SimpleTimer class provided by Greenfoot (you can import it into your scenario in the same way you imported the Counter class in Chapter 1, Let's Dive Right in…); however, waiting for a specific amount of time is rarely the right choice.

Why is that? Well, Greenfoot provides the player/user with the ability to slow down and speed up a scenario via the Speed slider that is located at the bottom of Greenfoot's main scenario window. If you waited for 2 seconds in your code and then the player sped the game up, the 2 seconds wait would last much longer in the game relative to the speed of everything else; the reverse effect would happen if the user slowed down...

Easing

For our last major section of this chapter, we are going to look at using easing equations to move our actors around in interesting ways. Easing functions use easing equations to calculate position as a function of time. Just about every animation you've seen on the web, your mobile device, or in the movies uses easing at some point in time. We are going to add three new actors to our game that move according to three different easing functions: linear, exponential, and sinusoidal.

Power-ups and power-downs

Power-ups are an excellent way to add new challenges and balance player skill. Power-ups provide players with momentary boosts in speed, power, health, or some other game-related skill. They often appear randomly and might not be in the most convenient location, so they require players to make fast, real-time decisions where they have to weigh the risk of moving to the power-up versus its beneficial effects.

Similarly, we can create randomly appearing game objects that negatively...

Avoider Game

Our Avoider Game is getting more complete and fun to play. In Chapter 5, Interactive Application Design and Theory, we will look at game design theory on how to build fun and engaging games. At that time, we will revisit our game and increase its playability.

Revisiting Avoider Game


In this chapter, we are going to continue to work on Avoider Game, which we created in Chapter 1, Let's Dive Right in…. If you skipped that chapter, or just prefer to start off with a fresh copy, you can download the code for this game from this book's product page on the Packt Publishing website at http://www.packtpub.com/support. Any concepts I gloss over in this chapter were most likely covered in detail in the previous chapter; be sure to refer to that chapter as needed. Now, open the AvoiderGame scenario in Greenfoot and read on.

Image swapping and movement


Image swapping is the age-old technique for animating. Perhaps as a child, you drew a stick figure in the corner of a pad of paper and slightly changed it on every succeeding page. When you rapidly flipped through the pages, your stick figure came to life. Figure 2 shows my attempt at this type of animation.

Figure 1: This shows old-school stick figure animation

In Greenfoot, we are going to animate actors by rapidly switching between images and achieve the same effect as the paper animation shown in Figure 1. We will learn how to use Greenfoot's setImage() method to do this.

Using setImage()

When we create a new Actor in Greenfoot by subclassing from the Actor class, or one of our subclasses of Actor, Greenfoot prompts us to enter in the name of our new class and to select an image for it. Greenfoot also allows us to dynamically set the image of our Actor objects while the scenario is running, using the method setImage()provided by Greenfoot's Actor class. The following...

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Description

This book is for coding students and Java programmers of all levels interested in building engaging, interactive applications with Greenfoot. Familiarity with the very basics of Greenfoot is assumed.

Who is this book for?

This book is for coding students and Java programmers of all levels interested in building engaging, interactive applications with Greenfoot. Familiarity with the very basics of Greenfoot is assumed.
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Publication date : Apr 27, 2015
Length: 310 pages
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Language : English
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Table of Contents

11 Chapters
1. Let's Dive Right in… Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. Animation Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. Collision Detection Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. Projectiles Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. Interactive Application Design and Theory Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. Scrolling and Mapped Worlds Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
7. Artificial Intelligence Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
8. User Interfaces Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
9. Gamepads in Greenfoot Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
10. What to Dive into Next… Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon 4.7
(3 Ratings)
5 star 66.7%
4 star 33.3%
3 star 0%
2 star 0%
1 star 0%
PZM Jun 16, 2015
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
If you’re looking for a great way to learn or teach Java through interactive Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) and games, Creative Greenfoot by Michael Haungs is the right book at the right time. I’m an AP Computer Science teacher who, like many of my students, was sad to see the Gridworld case study labs go away. The immediate, hands-on, GUI nature of those labs was a very engaging way to teach students certain topics that can otherwise be fairly dry.Greenfoot is a GUI programming environment that’s accessible from Mac, Linux, or Windows, and that gives the programmer a seemingly endless open canvas upon which to make her or his creative ideas come to life. Dr. Haungs’ book skillfully teaches us how we can use Greenfoot to program worlds and games that far exceed what we ever did in Gridworld.In Creative Greenfoot, Dr. Haungs starts things off with a bang, getting us programming a simple game with moving objects and an interactively user-controlled hero, along with a score and start and end screens, all in chapter one. He does so with humor and style, and gets us coding right from the start. Just as importantly, he introduces us to crucial computer science concepts almost without our knowing, and encourages our own experimentation as a means to understanding. We learn, subtly, about some basic object oriented programming (OOP) concepts, compilation, conditionals, and Java syntax and style without getting bogged down in details. We learn how to interact with the mouse and add music to our game, and start to build our knowledge of important gaming concepts such as scoring, levels, and object interaction (collisions).Chapter two revisits the game and adds to our gaming understanding by taking a high level look at animation, timing and easing. We do this while building our programming knowledge too, getting our first exposure to such things as exceptions, casting, functional decomposition, operators, and even a scratch at the surface of abstract classes and the Java List interface.The next few chapters keep us engaged with new games: Zombie Invasion and the Cupcake Counter, while also broadening our understanding of gaming concepts (more collision detection, projectiles, particle effects, and gravity) and programming concepts (loops, inheritance, interfaces).The middle of the book takes a closer look at interactive application design and game theory; user conditioning, story telling, and the development cycle, so we gain a broader, well balanced look at how our creative and coding processes mesh with our target audience and our game’s usability and fun factor.In the last three chapters, Creative Greenfoot shows us how to unbound our world and provide a scrolling environment, how to give our players a little bit of artificial intelligence in the form of route finding (think mazes), and how to build our own User Interface elements, all the while building our gaming-building knowledge and coding skills. More engaging scenarios are introduced and, as always, each chapter ends with suggestions and challenges to take your creations to the next level.I found this book to be a wonderful windfall at the end of the year as something fun and engaging to do with my students after the AP exam, but I also plan to incorporate much of this material next year starting at the beginning of Fall semester. There’s plenty of fun, engaging material to start the year and it goes at the right pace to cycle back to all year long as we learn new concepts.I definitely recommend this book whether you’re a teacher like me or a student looking to spice up your beginning programming class or just someone who wants to code and learn some fundamental gaming and computer science concepts along the way.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
cameron olson Jul 26, 2015
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Although I learned to program a few years before this book was written, I learned how to program using these kinds of methods almost exactly (Although I learned with Actionscript and not Greenfoot). It covers not just the technical aspects of creating a game, but also introduces the basics of the field of game design, and is a great starting point.The only problems are in the final chapter, when it talks about making bigger games. For people who make games, they know that making games is the best way to improve their design skills, but this isn't mentioned in the last chapter and probably should be. The other problem is that it encourages readers to immediately make bigger games, which isn't necessarily bad, but most people starting to make games tend to vastly underestimate the scope and difficulty of making bigger games, and can end up discouraged when they can't complete the project. But if you already know these things, these little gripes aren't really a problem. So if you are just starting out as somebody who wants to make games, then this is a good starting point from which to SLOWLY start making bigger games. If you just want a fun way to learn Java, then this is still a great starting place.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Thomas Cooper Aug 02, 2015
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
Creative Greenfoot is an excellent book for game programmers who want an overview of the Greenfoot libraries. The book mainly focuses on introducing creative ways to use the libraries to program some intermediate and advanced behaviors in characters, such as a review of the collision detection methods for zombies breaching a town. This allows students familiar with the basics of Java to expand on the programming concepts they learned in an introductory Java course. The author also does a great job showing how methods in the Greenfoot libraries can be used to program more advanced behaviors like programming parallax into a star field to make it look like your characters are moving through space or using stacks and path finding algorithms to solve a maze in a game world. I tested this book in my intermediate Java programming course and my students used the concepts introduced in this book to build some fantastic projects for the semester. My students particularly liked the chapters on scrolling worlds and tiled worlds. This book is for intermediate to more advanced programmers, as the author does not explain basic programming concepts like inheritance, abstraction, and polymorphism well. There are some great ideas for teachers of Advanced Placement Computer Science courses who are looking for end-of-year projects for students, or for those students who always seem to be ahead of everyone else in the class.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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