Animation

This will show you how to animate a character. The idea is to use a texture which is actually a strip of frames, then knowing the width and height of each frame should allow you to only display the part of the texture which represents the current frame.

Changing the Player Class

Firstly, change the name of the Texture2D to something more appropriate eg PlayerAnimation:

public Texture2D PlayerAnimation;

We now need to add the following variables to the player to control the frame displayed:

// Get the width of the player ship
// The time since we last updated the frame
int elapsedTime;

// The number of frames that the animation contains
int frameCount;

// The index of the current frame we are displaying
int currentFrame;

// The color of the frame we will be displaying
Color color;

// The area of the image strip we want to display
Rectangle sourceRect = new Rectangle();

// The area where we want to display the image strip in the game
Rectangle destinationRect = new Rectangle();

// Width of a given frame
public int FrameWidth;

// Height of a given frame
public int FrameHeight;

The Draw Method

You will need to alter the Draw method, this will draw the PlayerAnimation at the location specified in the destinationRect. But it will only draw the section of the playerAnimation specified in the sourceRect:

public void Draw(SpriteBatch spriteBatch)
{
	spriteBatch.Draw(PlayerAnimation, destinationRect, sourceRect, color);
}

Change the Initialize method

public void Initialize(Texture2D animation, Vector2 position)
{
	PlayerAnimation = animation;

	// Set the starting position of the player around the middle of the screen and to the back
	Position = position;

	// Set the player to be active
	Active = true;

	// Set the player health
	Health = 100;
			 
	this.color = Color.White;
	this.FrameWidth = 115;
	this.FrameHeight = 69;
	this.frameCount = 8;

	// Set the time to zero
	elapsedTime = 0;
	currentFrame = 0;
}

The Initialize method needs to configure the frame information. The sprite strip will have 8 frames, each one 115 pixels by 69 pixels. The elapsed time is to time the change from frame to frame, the current frame will record the frame to be displayed. The other main change is the PlayerAnimation, updating the variable names to match the changes in the previous section.