In most games you will use some sort of animation during the game, whether it be a flag waving in the breeze or the player bending over to pick something up. The term "animation" refers to the ability to change the look of, and move, objects.

Animations in AGS are managed using Views. A "view" is a set of one or more "loops". A loop is a set of frames which, when put together, give the effect of movement. Each frame in the view can be set a graphic and a speed.

Go to the editor's "Views" node, right-click it and select the "New view" option to create us a new, empty view. Double-click the new view to open it. Each loop is displayed horizontally with its number at the left hand side, frames going out to the right. To add a frame, click the grey "New frame" button. To delete a frame, right-click it.

To change a frame's graphic, double-left-click it. The sprite list screen will be displayed (you may remember this from the Object graphic selection) where you can choose the graphic you want to use for this frame.

Note that for walking animations, the first frame in each loop is reserved for the standing frame, and when walking it will only cycle through from the second frame onwards.

You select a frame by left-clicking it -- when you do so, the property grid will update with information about the frame. One of these settings is called "Delay", which is the frame's relative speed. The larger the number, the longer the frame stays (ie. the slower it is). When the animation is run, an overall animation speed will be set, so the actual speed of the frame will be: overall_speed + frame_speed . Note that you can use negative numbers for the frame delay to make it particularly fast, for example setting it to -3 means that the frame will stay for hardly any time at all.
Animation speed is specified in Game Loops (ie. animation speed 4 will show the frame for 4 game loops - at 40fps, that would be 0.1 seconds).

The "Sound" propery allows you to enter a sound number that will be played when this frame becomes visible on the screen. This is especially useful for footstep sounds.

You run an animation by using the script animation commands, which will be explained in detail later. Briefly, to animate an object, you first of all need to set the object's view to the correct view number (use the Object.SetView script command), and then use the Object.Animate script command to actually start the animation.