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Hey guys! Is it possible to store animation frames externally in any easy way?
The one way I could think of, is using something like the text blitter, and making very tedious "IF hero's animation frame is 1, set Text Blitter alterable text to A", "IF hero's animation frame is 2, set Text Blitter alterable text to B", etc.
It would be cool to make a game that's moddable by changing .png files or something like that.
Also, any way that you can change your username on these forums without making a new account :P?
I'd like to know the same. There's animated picture object/active picture and using a text blitter. Animated picture may be your best bet, as far as animating the frames go. You'd just load the tileset, then specify which frames you wanted to animate.
ie, Animate - Start(4) - End(7) - Loop Back to (4) at Speed(100), Loop(0)
If the sheet had only 4 tiles on a row, then it'll automatically jump to the next row for the number.
0|1|2|3
4|5|6|7
(Second row tiles will begin at 4)
0|1|2|3|4|5
6|7|8|9|10|11
(and so on)
I've been wanting to externalize all my objects, but I just hadn't gotten around to fiddling with it yet. Maybe someone else has an easier approach.
Edit - Just realized you're on iOS, so using the animated picture extension isn't going to work. Text blitter is all I can think of sadly.
Active Picture object should do just fine...
I have the iOS exporter, but I'm working mainly with normal PC runtime :P.
I guess for what I'd potentially need it for next year, your method will work perfectly. Thanks a lot :D. I don't want to externalize all the graphics, just the main character pretty much.
It would be great if MMF had a feature in the regular active object animation editor, to link the frames to image files instead of containing the frames in the object/memory!
I'd suggest Active Picture but it's a pain to animate anything with it, especially with multiple animations. I don't think it can pick individual tiles from a tileset, so you'd have to use individual images and then just constantly load them to animate..which I imagine can't be too ideal performance wise when combined with 100's of AP's.
text blitter can cache images so you can use tilesets, and its a bit easier to animate it since you can use the charmap. (By easy, I'm talking how how "messy" the events will get when trying to get specific animations)
Actually I use a text blitter for my animated tiles in my level editor, and it works fine. No performance issues even with 1,000s of them. Since their animation is linear, Its easy to animate. With multiple animations, you'd just have to find some way of keeping track of which animation loops/repeats/etc, most likely with an array or ini.
Yeah I'd love this. I'd have everything externalized.Quote:
Originally Posted by MattKapa
Email an admin like Jeff. Say please!Quote:
Originally Posted by MattKapa
I'd use the TextBlitter. Also, you can set the alterable string to a character in the character map: GetCharFMap$( "Text Blitter", FRAMENUMBER). If you already know how long each animation is in frames, just stash it all into a combined image and load it into the TextBlitter. It would basically be one long animation that contains all the animations. Unfortunately, you'd have to have another external file that acts as an index for the object's animations, listing their animation speed, frame x to frame x limits, looping, actionspots, etc. It shouldn't be hard to get it running, though.
Edit: Oh. The TextBlitter wasn't ported to any other runtime. Nobody shares this view, but I have no idea of why such a good extension was abandoned.
The full size of the character set is allocated in the memory for every instance of the object, so it's not a useable object for this purpose.
There would only be one instance, if I understood MattKappa correctly. And if Clickteam has the source of the TB, it would probably be an easy fix.
Could you elaborate on this please? It sounds like a huge limitation I'm unaware of.Quote:
Originally Posted by Nifflas
Also, I forgot to mention you have to use a workaround in order to get transparent pixels with the Animated Picture Object since it doesn't support that option...(someone should really update that extension)
You need to use the Surface object to load the tileset since it supports transparency, then export it as an overlay address. Then you'd load the overlay address into the Animated Picture and it'll work.