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Imagine you were working on a big project, and each character had 4 directions, 4 attacks (1 for each direction) 4 different alternate moves (for showing expresions) and an idle frame (for 4 directions). Now imagine you wanted to have more than 1 character.

How many frames and variables would you have to keep track of to use specframe. A whole crap load.

Specframes fine for really simple small games, but the lack of ability to create new named animations is in my opinion Verges greatest flaw. It makes the whole .chr file almost useless for any RPG that wants to have a battle system.

Thats why I've been working on an organized way of dealing with animations, but thats another story.

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Alright theres numerous entities, that can move in 4 directions. Only like 4 animations are shared between entities.
those are: Attack, Move, Jump, Defend.

However some entities, need other animations.
so to one entity, I decide it needs to be able to A) Wave hands up and down rapidly.
Another entity needs to A) Be able to sit B) Be able to stand up C) Put bottle to his mouth while sitting D) Put bottle to his mouth while standing.
Another entity needs to be able to A) Hand things out
while still another needs to be able to shake his hand vigorously and ram his staff into the ground.

Now then, none of these animations are shared by other characters, none of them have #_frames restrictions. All of need to work in 4 directions, and theres 0 ordering to the frames, because that maps updating animations impossible.

And your telling me to define all of the animations?
That would be well over 100 defines (and probably over 500) just for the instances I've described above. Good luck pulling that off, believe me, I've tried things like that before.

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...that you're too lazy yourself to code that kind of system, and want the verge developers, who already has too much work, to do all the coding for you. If you think it'll be that hard to implement such an engine, why do you think it would be any easier for them do to?

I don't think it should be that hard to make custom animations. If you really need an "easier" way to use that, you should make your own animation string parser, so that you can pass an animation string to that parser, and it animates the sprite after that animation string. That way you won't have to code a new animation function for each new animation you need, you just need to put together one parser function, and make the animation strings for each character.

In pseudocode:
string anicode[(as many as you need)];
int aniactive[(same)], aniframe[(same)], anidelay[(same)], anicount[(same)];
void Animate(string code, int sprite)
{
anicode[sprite]=code;
anicount[sprite] = 0;
aniactive[sprite] = 1;
(code to extract the first frame to be used, and the animation delay, store those in aniframe and anidelay)
entity.specframe[sprite]=aniframe[sprite];
}

void AnimateTimer()
{
(note that in the following code must be done for each active element in the array. and you'll of course need the array pointers.)
anicount++;

if (anicount=anidelay) {
anicount=0;
(extract next set of animation frame/delay from anicode, if end of string start from the beginning)
entity.specframe[sprite]=aniframe[sprite];
}

}

IF you have AnimateTimer() in a hooktimered script (and have coded it right), you should be able to use Animate("(animation code)") to start a new animation.

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Oh.

For a lot of custom animations, an animation string parser would be the way to go.

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Out of clutter, find simplicity. -Einstein