One of the ideas that hasn’t left my head in the past few months is the concept of a generic Super Robot Wars engine. That is, a tactical RPG coating with a beautifully-animated chewy center. Much of SRW’s appeal to me(outside of big smashy robots) are the attack animations, which are 2D cel- and vector-animation at its finest. And there’s no lack of fans wanting to get in on the action with Photoshop, or even building it.
Contemplating how to do the attack animations naturally leads me to Flash, but trying to layer something on top of GameSWF screams of nothing but pain. I got to thinking about SVG today, long billed a more standardized way of animating. A few research papers later it turns out that along with SMIL, SVG Tiny 1.2 is reported as being great for this kind of work. There’s even a handy Java library for it.
But then comes the frustration: barely any usable native tools. Beatware Mobile Designer looked great, but apparently it’s been bought out by a generic “solutions” company. Ikivo Animator has potential, but no OSX port of their latest version. Synfig has an OSX port, but it’s just been withdrawn due to packaging problems. Inkscape has animation on their “indefinite TODO list” (although to be fair, they’ve got a good deal of discussion about it). And Moho and Plastic Animation Paper just don’t export to SVG(nor do a lot of other packages, really). Vexing.
