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ATL is very intuitive and can add great polish to your game, but it can seem a little intimidating if you've never used it before. Hopefully people will find these examples useful. The wiki has a great section on Animation and Transformation Language.

Opacity
Custom fades are your friend--you can make a game look much more polished by adding custom fades to sprites instead of having them pop up and vanish. Here's a simple fade effect that occurs during one second. Alpha 0.0 is invisible and alpha 1.0 is opaque. "Linear" means seconds. We add "on show" and "on hide" to have effects for both.




Basic Animations
Realistic Rain
Search for rain animation tutorials to find an easy way to make images. I used this tutorial for Gimp. I got a nice result using three frames. Define your image by indicating the images and the amount of time between each:


If you want rain during an exterior, layer your images with rain at the end. (Images are layered on top of each other, so the first image shown will be at the "back" of the screen.)


If you want rain on outside of an interior scene, you would layer the rain before the interior image (which needs to have transparent windows or some other way to see the rain on the other side, of course).


You can also build a layered image using LiveComposite (it ain't just for sprites).




Flicker
You can take advantage of the Null command in animation loop to make an image flicker. It can create a neat effect on terminal-like objects and screens.



Basic Horizontal and Vertical Movement
This makes a little airplane go from the left to the right side of the screen over 45 seconds. Since I only used this effect once I included the position commands in the image definition, so you just type to get the effect.


You could drop a ball from the top of the screen to the bottom by adjusting the y-position instead.




Choice and Parallel - Adding Simultaneous and Random Elements

Randomized Lightning
This takes advantage of the choice command to use random images at random positions. Make three (or however many) lightning images, and define the image to show a random lighting picture using choice:


You can weight the likelihood of choices by adding an integer (the default is 1.0):


Now we will create a transform that causes the lightning to 1) appear at random places at the top of the screen and 2) flash. To do this we will use parallel statements, which allow us to executes multiple ATL blocks at the same time. The first parallel block sets the image position at one of three x-positions at the top of the screen. The second parallel block causes the image to appear and disappear within 0.5 seconds, simulating a flash.




Combine Horizontal and Vertical Motion
In Locked-In there is a scene where a waiter walks by a with a dinner tray. I made the tray move from right to left, AND slightly up and down to simulate walking, by splitting the y movement and the x movement into two parallel blocks.


Rotate
Analog Clock
For this you will need a separate clock face, minute hand, and hour hand. The hour hand rotates in 60 seconds and the minute hand rotates in 5 seconds. If you get a bad jitter effect on slow rotations you can add subpixel True to smooth things out.




If you want the hands to rotate counter-clockwise, you can do it by giving a negative rotation:


Swinging Back and Forth
This is how I made the padlock on the Locked-In logo swing back and forth before coming to a standstill. I use a block statement to separate the latter part of the transform.


If you wanted it to swing back and forth indefinitely, you could do it using a repeating block:


As you can see, zoom is conspicuously absent. If anyone wants to add their own examples/improvements, please do.

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Lucky Special Games - Locked-In - Young Earth Road Trip - The Censor (Nano 2013) WIP

This is a really good post to put all the codes together as one. The rain code never worked for me, so i ended up trying a difference method. I just replaced the Cherry Blossom png with one of the rain's image files.

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http://berry-melon.deviantart.com/

Rad, thanks for all of the contextual examples. Those always help me with my coding.

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These examples are great. Thanks for posting them.

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"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face in marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming" - Theodore Roosevelt

Would you be ok with me putting these together into a sampler game?

Susan

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In order to understand recursion, one must first understand recursion. (Anonymous)

Go for it, that's a great idea.

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Lucky Special Games - Locked-In - Young Earth Road Trip - The Censor (Nano 2013) WIP

Added a bit about using LiveComposite to layer bg images (thaaaank you apricotorange). I also added a flicker animation, which was inspired by some code foo PyTom posted in the questions forum a while back.

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Lucky Special Games - Locked-In - Young Earth Road Trip - The Censor (Nano 2013) WIP

Thanks a lot for posting these. I'm sure these will come in very handy .

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Working on a VN to teach lower-conversational Japanese, and a guide to living in Japan.
It's a very long dev process.

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Lovely codes!
When I figured out how to implement them, they were exactly what I was looking for, thanks!

Just in case there are other people out there who missed the easy part.

example:

"lamp" is the image which I defined earlier, and "lock" is the name of the transform. Activate it with "at".
"show lamp at lock"

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My Dev.art - My VN WiP Blog --- The Halberd and the Tiger VN

I thought I'd be smart enough to figure this out on my own but lol no. Instead of going insane by myself, it'd be a lot faster and less painful to ask the ATL master directly.

Right now I know how to use ATL to make all my sprites appear on the screen simultaneously. I even figured out how to use ATL at custom positions:

It looks nice and it's not hard to code after you define your ATL blocks once. However, these ATL transitions only work when you want to show the sprite initially. If I try to do something like this:
The sprite has no smooth transitions and the new expression is just plastered onto the spot/disappears suddenly. I can use dissolve if I want, but that will make the textbox disappear momentarily, which is okay when it's every so often but we all know that expressions change constantly throughout the script.

In other words, what I am doing wrong here?

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Visit the OELVN wiki at the top of the forum! We have free assets, programs, tutorials, tips and more over there. I'm the administrator, PM me if you want to help organize the place. I could use a hand.

Try adding:



I just learned about that recently myself.

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Lucky Special Games - Locked-In - Young Earth Road Trip - The Censor (Nano 2013) WIP

It has the odd habit of working 50% of the time :C It works only with certain sprites/expressions, which doesn't make much sense because they should all basically be the same. I've deleted my persistent data just in case but that doesn't change anything either.

I'm not sure if this means anything, but replace and replaced aren't highlighted in brown in Editra. The script doesn't really mean anything either.

*sighs and collapses at desk*

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Visit the OELVN wiki at the top of the forum! We have free assets, programs, tutorials, tips and more over there. I'm the administrator, PM me if you want to help organize the place. I could use a hand.

Transform is performed with other processes. So when images are loading/caching, it causes delay and blank. You can overlap the time of face changes to hide this blank, but its difficult to do on pose changes.

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Great tutorial ! I've tried some and it's successful~ Big thanks !
Just wondering because I'm a Renpy noob, can you combine the rain animation and lightning effect at the same time ? What code should I write ? (i don't think parallel statement can be used for animation...)
Thanks again~


Just use GIMP or Photosop to make rain effect, vary the noise effect from 50-55% with uniform distribution, then Filter-Motion Blur should do the trick. Just animated it, and voila~

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Completed project :
[Campus Life][Education]Tour de Pharmacy
[Trivia/Quiz][Education]Pharmacy Quiz 1.0
[Trivia/Quiz][Education]Physical Pharmacy

ATL can do many things !
ERASER [Slice of Life][Sci-fi] : My Next Project Visual Novel

DOODLE COMPILATION

"All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; only the dose permits something not to be poisonous" (Paracelsus, The Father of Toxicology)
So Visual Novel overdose = POISON XD

"Let us learn to DREAM, then we may perhaps find the truth" (August Kekule, the benzene structure inventor)
so let me sleep at least 8 hours per day !

Yes, you would just show them both.

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Lucky Special Games - Locked-In - Young Earth Road Trip - The Censor (Nano 2013) WIP