This week was our beginning into animations. Not in the whole 4K cutscene kind of format, but more in the sense of creating a restraint for game mechanics to play by. For example, if I were to shoot a bow into the air without any form of animation, it would literally go in a straight line. With animation, I now have the power to decide the vector and magnitude of that arrow and the code has to obey that every time an arrow is fired. While we went over the process to create it, I found it quite difficult to comprehend exactly how to programme one myself. As far as I understand it, we are creating a function called a LERP which is called any time we wish to play the animation; the easing is the normalised variable we apply the maths to in order to achieve the effect we’re after, but I haven’t quite nailed this part yet. The concept side of this that truly fascinates me is how many different places this type of animation can actually be used in (Colour changing, Vectors, Opacity, etc).

Theory side, we learnt the differences between time and frame-based animation which in simple terms, is when the objects applied their attributes either by addition each frame or by a fractional multiplier each frame. The addition will cause a range of framerates to vary the same animation whereas the multiplication will keep the animations at the same point but just update them less than or more than other varying framerates which why it works better for games. I have covered this more in my fundamental task two, section one to engrain it further into my knowledge.

Back to my previous point, section two follows on about the LERPS and analyses them further. To do this the task set made us understand both the maths and code side of the LERP by creating our own ones for mechanics within our games. Now the maths side of it, I was a lot more confident in as my knowledge over graphs and different rules used to produce different waves and curves came in handy from A-level, but the coding side was the part that confused me. Not exactly the how to code it but more the implement so that its used properly within my code. This is definitely something I need to practice on but even without knowing how to implement it; has really shown me how certain games can pull off timed events so well because they can measure and match up the animations they create.

This week so far has shown me that in more theory sided stuff of this course is going to be quite challenging and I need to definitely research over how LERPs are implemented as it could act as quite a useful asset later to know. Something I need to work on is keeping an open mind to using new methods because so far, I think I’ve been struggling to take it on but if I can learn to take it in it could make my life so much easier in the future. I really need to learn the best ways to adapt but for the moment I should focus on getting to the same point as everyone.