After changing lots of super-technical stuff for the last couple of weeks, there’s finally some fun things to report! Enter the Moviesandbox Timeline.
Well, it’s a timeline, so it might not be that exciting, as most people have very clear ideas of what a timeline should look like and how it should work. But it’s there, and it does work. Creating new keys by right-clicking in the timeline, selecting them by left clicking, dragging them around, zooming in to fine-tune timing, scrubbing to preview animations or playing directly from it and so on.
Right now, rotation and location keys are not separated and skeletal Actors create keys for the whole skeletal system, for simplicity’s sake. It’s fun!

The way MSB handles timelines is a bit different of – say – After Effects. Instead of having one main timeline from which everything is playing out (where’s the fun in that?), you use it to create Actions, that you can then assign to your objects and trigger at specific moments. For example, you can create a hand waving action and have it trigger on a key press. This way, I’m mixing the linear qualities of creating animation with the non-linearity of live-control.
With the timeline in a happy state, I can now move on to implement a proper lighting system. You know, with placeable lights and shadows and stuff. And lighting is last on my list before I go into open Beta! Exciting!