Corona – Movie Clips

Often you will want to create a short animated clip. This is good for a lots of things especially games. A movieClip is an object that contains a series of images. Movieclips can play display their images in succession to create animated effect.

MovieClips are really a series of images loaded into to Corona and played in sequence. You could accomplish this with a Group containing all of the images and an array. Then writing an enterFrame function to cycle through the images in the array making each one visible in turn.

You could do all of that but, you don’t need to since someone over at Corona has all ready done it for you! This example uses the movieclip.lua file. You can find this in CoronaSDK/SampleCode/Graphics/MovieClip.

Create a new Corona project.

1. Create a folder to work in
2. Copy the movieclip.lua file from CoronaSDK/SampleCode/Graphics/MovieClip into the folder where you will be working
3. Create a new text file and save it into the folder an name it main.lua
4. Create a series of small images to use for the animated sequence. Imagine these images as frames in a movie. Save the images into the project folder

Add the following code to main.lua

-- Import an external library
local movieclip = require("movieclip")

-- Since we're importing a library we need to make a main function
-- to run after the library has loaded

-- Define the main function to initialize this program
function main()
 -- This line makes a new animated "movieClip" from the saucer images in the table
 saucer = movieclip.newAnim{"saucer_01.png", "saucer_02.png", "saucer_03.png"}

 saucer.x = display.contentWidth / 2
 saucer.y = display.contentHeight / 2

 -- Start the animation playing
 saucer:play()
end

-- Call main to start the program
main()