how to flip a sprite in c#

Question

I'm making a little game based on XNA game development's tutorial game "shooter"... after a bit of trial and error, I made my own animated sprite that i can move around the screen. The problem is, he's always facing right.

How can i change this (image below) so that he faces the right direction every time the key event is pressed?!

I'm pretty new to C# as you might have guessed, and I realize this may be more complicated than i thought, so i just need to know how to make the sprite face right when moving right and left when he's moving left.

image

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

You can also do this by passing the SpriteEffects.FlipHorizontally option to yourSpriteBatch.Draw() method. But as others have said this will have more overhead than using a sprite sheet.

Answer 2

Usually a sprite sheet will contain images for each direction. You can flip the image at runtime, but it adds image processing that is unnecessary. I would suggest to you that you simply create a sprite sheet up front with each animation baked in and just figure out which frame to display at runtime.

See an example of a simple sprite sheet here