Animation object request (paid, $400)

[Nifflas]

For a future project I'm going to need an advanced active picture with caching and animation support (and the usual stuff, such as rotation, scaling, etc). I will pay $200 for this, and Jeff said he would match my donation and pay an additional $200. The code must be clean, optimized, commented, and a copy of the extension souce should be sent to Clickteam. When the HWA SDK is out, the extension must get support for that (although if you can get it to work with HWA before, that would be awesome). The extension should be released for free, so the whole community can use it.

I have very specific requests on how this extension should work to be as functional as possible, so PM me for details.

Edit:

Here's what I have in mind.

Actions [not instance-bound]
  * Cache Tiled Image File
    - loads an image file into the RAM.
  * Cache Tiled Image File As Alpha
    - loads a monochrome image file into the RAM,
      and applies that as an alpha channel over a
      solid colour. The colour of the entire image
      is determined from an expression.
  * Remove image from cache.

Note: When you cache an image, you load it as a sprite-sheet.
By that reason, you always specify a tile width and height via
an expression when you run a "Cache Image" action. Multi-row
sprite sheets should be possible.

Actions [per-instance]
  * Load cached image into instance
  * Set animation frame
  * Animate (from frame, too frame, animation speed, repeat count)
  * Stop Animation
  * Set hot spot position

Expressions
  * Position
  * Current Frame

The usual stuff
  * Alterable Values
  * Ink Effects
  * Destroy
  * Scale
  * Angle

[MechatheSlag]

So basically the active picture extension but with animation support?

[Werbad]

Me and Daniel could probably do it. I will have to talk with Daniel first though since I have no experience making graphical extensions...

[Nifflas]

So basically the active picture extension but with animation support?

...and better cache handling. Some other things too I'll explain later.

[Nifflas]

Werbad: Cool! If you and Daniel says Yes, I'll definitely ask you to do it.

[Pixelthief]

i built cache handling into my games when I had to load textures with the overlays >.> But yes an active object with runtime loadable textures is one of the sorely needed things in MMF. It really opens it up to being a more object-oriented programming instead of immutable active-object-oriented programming

[Pixelthief]

if there was a paste-object into active picture like there was for overlay you could accomplish that entire thing inside of MMF, to boot.

[Nifflas]

I'm not interested in workarounds really. A dedicated extension is better for a task that I will use repeatidly in many projects.

Besides, multiple active objects with the same image eats additional RAM. With the caching features I suggest, lots of instances won't allocate more ram for identical graphics.

[Nifflas]

Looks like Werbad and Daniel is up to it!

[ionside]

Sorry for my ignorance as I'm still learning here; how is this different from an active object?
I like the sprite sheet idea, are you hoping for it to support .png format for the alpha channel?