Animating with KitterSpeak

Do you want to make your patches move and dance? This is a tutorial to walk you through creating your own animated object in Furcadia!

Preparing an object to animate

1. Open up the Fox Editor by clicking Patch Editor on the C tab in Furcadia
2. Open the file that you want to edit. Item4.fox and Floors2.fox come with a few example animations, but it's recommended to make your animated items in Iteme. The easiest way to do this is to use the Open A Copy feature, shown in the image to the left.
3. Once you have your patch file opened in the Fox Editor, select the shape number that you want to animate.
4. Click the Animation menu at the top, and select Insert Frame. Draw your frame of animation, then repeat until you have all of them created.

In this example, we will be making a ball that goes several times around a player, and then flies under the player's feet, raising them up, and then repeats.

Since it's a simple shape, we only need 2 frames - a regular ball, and a squished ball for when it's under the player's feet.

If you want to see what your animation looks like so far, you can open the Animation Viewer from the Animation menu.

For now the ball just goes flat and then round again - not terribly exciting.

So, we need to open the Animation Editor from the Animation menu. There are currently 3 steps of KitterSpeak: a default delay (the time that each frame will be shown for) and two frames being shown.

Adding steps of animation

Moving the coordinates of the item

We want to make the ball move around, so in the Animation Editor:

1. Click Insert Step
2. Select to insert several copies of the Show Frame 1 step (frame 1 is the round version of the ball, in our case). Still, that's not very interesting: the ball still just stays in one place.
3. Add 2 steps before each frame to move the ball around: one to set the X position (how far across the screen it is) and one to set the Y position (how far down it is).

Looping the animation

To make the first section of the animation (the orbiting) happen three times, use the Loop to step # type and insert 3.

Another two steps before each frame moves the player around: one to set the X position (how far across the screen it is) and one to set the Y position (how far down it is).

Then we add two steps to get the orbiting effect: Move frame in front of furre, and Move frame behind furre.

Moving the player's position

When a player is moved by the ball, you have 2 choices:

1. The players can remain in the middle of their own screen, with the world moving down
2. Or they can move up, in the traditional manner when sitting on pillows and such

Each choice has different uses. Keeping the player in the center of their own screen allows for extremely smooth ride animations. For instance, you can have 10 frames of the player moving sideways in an animated floor, and DS to move them on to the next floor every second.

But for this animation, we would rather the players move up on their own screen, so we add the Set camera to follow furre step to the beginning of the animation and set it to 0 (this means the camera will not follow the furre).

Congrats, your animation is complete! Hit the Play button (the forward arrow) in the Animation Viewer to watch it animate.