   Tweening movement between walking animations.
  Hi,I've written a 2D sprite based engine that involves a character walking around.I have different animations for when the character is walking just forward, and when he is walking and turning to the right, and walking and turning to the left.Now with so many animations, I'm having trouble keeping the transitions smooth.eg. from what I can envision, I'm gonna need transition frames fromwalking forward -> walking forward and turning right,    walking forward -> walking forward and turning left,    walking forward -> not walking    walking forward and turning right -> walking forward    walking forward and turning right -> walking forward and turning left.    etc...that's a hell of a lot of transition frames. What techniques do major game companies use?I loaded in Zelda Windwaker, and wow: never a mistep, ever! I, myself, would be hard-pressed to walk as realistically as Link does.... How do they program that?Thanks a lot for your input,  -Cuppo   
  I imagine a lot of companies don't even bother with transition animations such as those. Those that do use them sometimes feel sluggish due to the delay in playing the turning-around animation. One such example is Flashback for SNES/GEN which has awesome animations but controls very badly. So you have to consider the impact on such animations in a game.Windwaker is a 3D game the probably uses some kind of skeletal/keyframe animation system and thus easier to blend animations than in sprite based animations. The 3D transitions can be done algorithmically instead of drawing every single transition frame.A sure way to organize your animations would be a state machine.A state for walking right,walking right turning left,walking left,... and so on.Good Luck.   ;  Thanks for the reply Jack,Yeah, i failed to consider the controller impact that all these transition frames would have. Thanks for opening my eyes to that.Perhaps I *am* being a little anal about the smoothness.Thanks for the link to the article about state machines. That was an eye-opener for me.   