Sorry your browser is not supported!

You are using an outdated browser that does not support modern web technologies, in order to use this site please update to a new browser.

Browsers supported include Chrome, FireFox, Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer 10+ or Microsoft Edge.

2D All the way! / Animation Playing-Standard

Author
Message
Mr Kohlenstoff
17
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 7th Jun 2006
Location: Germany
Posted: 5th Jan 2009 14:37
Hi.

As nearly always, I am currently working on one (or actually several) 2D-Game(s). As consequence I wrote a paint-like program for sprite- and animation-creation because paint is quite horrible to use, especially for realistic looks. (I am not talented enough to draw good sprites anyway, but at least I want to be able to make some placeholders which at least mirror the basic style I want to achieve)
I made several small (unspectacular and with no practical use) animations to test the capabilities of the application, for example an explosion and a mutating worm-like moving something. The images itself do not really play a role to my actual problem, but examples might help though.






Well, my problem is that I'd sometimes like to show such animations to friends or in forums. Images like the ones above do not really help because they do not show the animation in motion but just some separat, rather abstract frames. Thus I'm looking for a technique to show the animation itself instead of a group of frames. There might be some solutions, like exporting the animation as gif or movie-file or so, which however seem to be rather bad or complicated to achieve - e.g. because the gif-compression looks quite complicated to me and saving 10 frames as AVI would be an "overkill". So I wondered if it might be a better idea to create an own simple file-format, which would basically store some animation-relevant values like amount of Frames, rows and columns etc. and finally the complete image-file. A (self-written) viewer-program would then be able to read such files by extracting the image-data and to recreate and then play the animation. Would still be rather complicated and not that comfortable for other people though, cause they'd have to download each animation instead of watching it in their browser, and apart from that would need the viewer-program...

So, are there any better ideas?

DsarchyUK
15
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 21st Nov 2008
Location: UK
Posted: 8th Jan 2009 13:59
As long as its just you creating the animations. Your best bet would be to split the animation into its individual frames and then save them as separate images into a sub folder.

Then just use Photoshop/Gimp to batch process them into layers and create an animated GIF file from that.

This way your audience doesn't have to download anything extra to see your creations. If your planning to distribute your software then the animations could be viewed within the application itself so there wouldn't be any point in creating a separate program to view them.

http://dsarchy.deviantart.com/
BMacZero
18
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 30th Dec 2005
Location: E:/ NA / USA
Posted: 19th Jan 2009 02:19 Edited at: 19th Jan 2009 02:24
Yep, just tried that out. I wrote a program to split the image into frames:



Then opened all the frames in Photoshop. A Google search told me that if you paste them all into one file as layers (with the first frame on the bottom), you can go to "File/Save for Web", check "Animation", and save. Not sure exactly what you press in Gimp.





Cool, I learned something today .

Login to post a reply

Server time is: 2024-03-29 00:07:04
Your offset time is: 2024-03-29 00:07:04