sprite sheet animation support

[DreadKnight]

The modular unit abilities classes should be extend to properly support animation sprite sheets
which will be rendered in blender and assembled using https://github.com/FreezingMoon/Spritify
Will need to store the animation info in different files: assets/units/animations/unit_name.json.

[andretchen0]

Using sprite atlases would probably cut down page load times quite a bit.

I checkout out Spritify, linked above. There's the Sharp library on npm that doesn't require ImageMagick to be installed on the user's system.

I've got a simple sprite atlas creator that uses Sharp. It's really simple though. It only makes a single "page" of images and doesn't care much about efficiency. (I was just making pixel art games and everything easily fit in a single 1024x1024 image, so I didn't bother improving the packing or implementing multiple pages.)

With an extra script, we could have multiple "pages" – but I don't know if it's worth implementing for the current version of AB.

Fwiw, I've already put it into the Vue/Three.js version I've been working on. Here's the current sprite sheet.

[DreadKnight]

Using sprite atlases would probably cut down page load times quite a bit.

I checkout out Spritify, linked above. There's the Sharp library on npm that doesn't require ImageMagick to be installed on the user's system.

I've got a simple sprite atlas creator that uses Sharp. It's really simple though. It only makes a single "page" of images and doesn't care much about efficiency. (I was just making pixel art games and everything easily fit in a single 1024x1024 image, so I didn't bother improving the packing or implementing multiple pages.)

With an extra script, we could have multiple "pages" – but I don't know if it's worth implementing for the current version of AB.

Fwiw, I've already put it into the Vue/Three.js version I've been working on. Here's the current sprite sheet.

Nice, wasn't aware of Sharp, could come in handy. The sprite sheets are important when we'll have unit animations, hence why later in the milestone. For now we could use it for unit sets avatars, like in unit grid and queue, #1736
Pagination will be good, as there are plans for 2 more unit sets; Dark Priest could be skipped to stick with power of 2.

I'll update #198 in a bit to be about Phaser, but same idea, that way we'll reduce 1-3 Dark Priest sprites. And in v0.6 we can migrate to Phaser v3 #1584 so that we can implement #678 and make the game be lightweight initially & load fast.

[DreadKnight]

Death animations should deprecate #2520 if accepted.