Demon Ago-go! 8direction Animated Sprite

[OpenXTalkPaul]

SO, as far as I can see, there are 4 possibilities here:

1. Make what you can with what you've got.

(This IS, by-the-way, just fine for clones of "gubbins" such as Snail-Bob: and keeps the 9-12 year olds focused.)

Yes

2. See what gives with Malte Brill's animation engine, which he, out of great generosity, has released as an open source thing.

Yes

3. HACK the engine.

If it's done with great care, yes.

4. Tack on an animation engine from somewhere.

YES. I remember years ago when FFI was just getting going, Monte posted a GIF he made using Box2D via LCB.
Unfortunately he didn't post the source code. It's in the chat on their Github Gitter.im board, probably still there.

Of course the 'Elephant in the room" is "Do we really think it is an important thing to make slick-N-sexy Warcraft clones in OXT?"

I don't see why not. There's no reason that xTalk script couldn't be used in place of GDScript (from Godot game engine), in fact considering we have an early xTalk example in LINGO I think we already have the proof for it. Before Shockwave Flash came to be and with it a shift towards JavaScript-ishness, LINGO was the original scripting language for MacroMind Director (later Macromedia, then Adobe) and it was definitely an xTalk dialect. Interestingly some folks with the ScummVM project have been reimplementing LINGO.

[FourthWorld]

Director's frame rate blew the pants off any xTalk of the same era.

It was designed from the ground up for animation.

Not to say there aren't things we can do with OXT, but I've never seen an example with more than just a few sprites that didn't bog down noticeably.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

Director's frame rate blew the pants off any xTalk of the same era.

It was designed from the ground up for animation.

Not to say there aren't things we can do with OXT, but I've never seen an example with more than just a few sprites that didn't bog down noticeably.

This is true from my experience as well, but then all the examples I've seen are from like 2009 - 2010, the engine changed a lot after that, some newer methods utilizing new formats were added, with optimizations you mentioned, and CPUs have gotten faster. Plus I have some ideas about how things could work that I'd like to try. Particularly a StreetFighter style 2D fighter.