How do you change a spritesheet at runtime?

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ichbintobias2

Hello everyone, for my current project I need to manually change the used spritesheet at runtime. I tried playing around with the values of the @AnimationInfo annotation as well as the setSpritesheetName method.

Removing the entity alltogether and replacing it with another one is also something I thought of but I had no success with this as it is not possible to add entites that are not known to game.litidata at runtime (I think?).

How would you go about this?

nightm4re

So basically you're trying to play an animation on an Entity, am I getting that right?
First, you need to add an Animation to the EntityAnimationController of your Entity.
Then, you can simply let the animation play as shown in the example below.

Creature myCreature = new Creature("spritesheetName");
String animationName = "creatureDance";
myCreature.animations().add(new Animation(Resources.spritesheets().get(animationName), true));
myCreature.animations().play(animationName);

ichbintobias2

Yes, basically Currently I have two entities on my screen that are accessed via static methods and I wanted to make it seem like one was replaced by a new one, kinda hard to explain.
However, as it turns out, I was thinking waay too complicated and using animations is the obvious way to go here, especially because the entities should become animated in the future anyways.

Sadly, I couldn't manage getting it to work. I created a method called set() which is intended to replace the existing Singleton-Entity with another one. It looks like this:

However, it does nothing. The instance and animationName objects will be set correctly but no animation plays. I thought that re-setting the instance possibly caused a problem of the screen and the background code not talking about the same instance anymore, if that makes sense, but as I cut the constructor and used a setter instead, nothing changed.

I also tried adding the animation to the constructor and only calling the play() method from other classes but it didn't help either. At this point I don't know what to try anymore, do you have another idea what I could do or what the problem might be?

nightm4re

I'm sorry, just having this code sample is not enough for me to debug. What does "it does nothing" mean here?
How does the list of animations in instance.animations() look after adding the new animation? Can the new animation be instantiated correctly?

ichbintobias2

Yes, I figured it would be hardly enough to debug but there isn't really anything else to show in this regard. To try to give you more of a better picture I will append the full class as a link. I also did a lot of cleanup work, while debugging for this problem and getting better with the engine I realized that my approach was really messy.
To answer your questions, "does nothing" is explained right in the necxt sentence where I wrote "The instance and animationName objects will be set correctly but no animation plays". Sorry for my imprecise language there though. The animation will be instanced and added correctly. So the list contains three animations, one left, one right and the one that I want to start manually, as expected.
One thing I found out while debugging is that the play() method in the AnimationController class seems to not work as it should. I below screenshot you will see that I reach the line "this.currentAnimation = anim" but currentAnimation will not be set here. So when the next line "this.currentAnimation.start()" gets executed it is really the default animation that gets played and not the one I just added before.

Link to the entity class: https://hatebin.com/qeurivbaym

nightm4re

Is the entirety of your code available for download? I can try resolving the issue for you and then provide some hints why it failed.
In the example above, if you reach this.currentAnimation = anim;, then the current animation gets set correctly. I don't see anything not working as intended there.

ichbintobias2

Yes, I just put it on publicly visible. Here it is: https://github.com/ichbintobias2/pokegame
The class in question is de.tobias.pokegame.Monster in the frontend project. To reproduce my problem you will have to press start in the main menu, go right next to the NPC that has the same skin as you and talk to him with the 'F' key. Go through the dialog with enter and you will see the two placeholder graphics, the bottom one should be animated but is it not. Don't mind the cheap animation, it is just to test the waters
Thank you in advance!

nightm4re

I'm sorry, but I currently do not find the time to investigate any further. I will try to catch up soon!