Downloads
AnimationDemo Binary
AnimationDemo – Source

Setup
Go ahead and set up an XNA project. The system I’m showing here is rather simplistic, and has many areas in which it can be improved for efficiency, but this isn’t something that’s going to require a complex project setup.

How it will work
This animation system will include a very basic Finite State Machine-style animation, using a single sprite sheet for rendering. While scene objects in this sample only use a single sprite sheet per object, it could be modified so that animation data is stored outside of the scene object, which will pretty much be necessary (you’ll see why in a minute) for anything more complex than this sample.

Sprite sheets are expected to be set up with each included animation in the sheet containing an equal number of frames. Each animation state gets its own row within the sheet, with each frame of the animation taking up one column per row. Every frame must be the same size, and there is no assumed spacing or borders for the sheet or the frame. The image I am going to use in this sample is a running animation from The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past.

Fig 1: Sample Animation Sheet