Sams Teach Yourself Android Game Programming in 24 Hours

Hour 17. Frame Animation Using a Sprite Sheet/Atlas

What You’ll Learn in This Hour

• Animating with a single strip

• Drawing frames from a strip image

• Animating with a sheet (atlas)

• Testing sprite animation

Animating with a Single Strip

There are many ways to do frame animation in a video game. Perhaps the simplest method is to load each frame from a series of bitmap files with one frame per file. Using this technique, an array or list stores the frames. Another technique might involve a custom database (random access file) containing frames stored as binary data. For instance, it is possible to store all the bitmap files for an animation in a ZIP archive and then read them using a ZIP library. (The Java Archive utility, called JAR, uses ...