Most efficient method for animated images?

[Pixelthief]

If you don't want to dynamically chop up a tilesheet at runtime every single time a graphic is used, because of the mass read/write times, how about you take a sort of dual approach.

Have a system that, whenever a sprite sheet is detected, ie when you update your program, it runs a quick function that permanently chops up that sprite sheet into independent files stored in folder for your application. Then, you can load those animations into the object's animations using replace frames.

So it wouldn't be chopping up a sprite sheet every time it runs, but instead just once every time you update. It would store it as very many files, but uh, does that really matter?

[Konidias]

Forgive me if I'm not understanding this correctly, but it sounds like you have massive tilesheets that you want to use in your game.
Have you tried the Fusion Spritesheet exporter?

I'm not exactly sure what that program is supposed to be doing... I load my sprite sheet in there and it saves it out as the same sprite sheet with some boxes around the sprites?

Konidias
you cannot have multiple windows or window transparency (although you could easily hack-in these features once you get good with GL).

Aw foo... I don't think I'm going to be able to go and modify anything to add hacked-in features...

While it would be nice to use opengl for all of my actives, that could prove to be really complicated and I'm not exactly comfortable using it. I have a lot of stuff set up which involve interacting with active objects so that would all need to be redone I would imagine.

Have a system that, whenever a sprite sheet is detected, ie when you update your program, it runs a quick function that permanently chops up that sprite sheet into independent files stored in folder for your application. Then, you can load those animations into the object's animations using replace frames.

I think if I'm going to have all of the sprites saved as individual images, I might as well just do that all externally in the first place. No reason to have the program chopping up the full tilesets.

I wish there was a faster way to load images into an active object. I would be okay with having each spritesheet saved out as separate images and loading them all into the active objects but that would take years to do by hand. I'd need some way of automating this process... but I wouldn't want to be doing that at runtime.

[Konidias]

I've tested the surface object and it's giving me so-so results. Here's my test:

- 20 surface objects in frame (1 per character)
- 8 external spritesheet images are loaded (currently 1280x1536 pixels each)
- using threaded loading and the load time is about 8 seconds
- displays all 20 characters with proper sprites, animating 10 frames of idle animation and changing direction randomly every 2 seconds
- with the screen idle and roughly 10 characters on screen there is no fps drop
- scrolling the screen results in a slight fps drop but it's not noticeable as the drop is smooth and not jarring

So the end result is that this works... but it's taking a while to load up... and that's with the spritesheets only having animation for the idle animation. Considering characters will probably have a dozen different animations... We're looking at 12 times the file size which means 12x longer load times per character.

Which, if I had full spritesheets, it would mean that it would take several minutes to load, and that's being conservative. So I think I hit a dead end with the surface object also.

[Konidias]

Aha! So I didn't even really realize what the "import as animation" feature was for in MMF... haha...

So yeah, now I can just import them that way I guess... one direction at a time. It's a little bit slow but I guess this could work.

My question is... how bad will this effect the overall size/memory of the exe? How much can the active object handle? Could I potentially have an active object with 50 animations that each have 80 frames in 8 directions? At what point would this become a problem?

[Jacob]

It shouldn't be a problem. Make a quick app with the surface object that slices your tilesheets and exports numbered pngs

[Konidias]

Heheh I'm actually exporting with Lightwave and it just spits out every individual frame pretty rapidly... so that part at least is easy. I was doing that already except instead of it rendering individual frames it was exporting them as a big sprite sheet.

I guess this way can work, and it keeps everything neatly in the exe... Hopefully I don't get an issue where the exe is 100gb in size lol.

edit: I think the only issue now is that I'm not going to be able to store 100 different hats in a single active... which means I'm either going to have to have an active for each hat (100 actives just for hats! *cry*) or I'm going to have to figure out something else... lol... Just when I think I have a good solution. *BAM*

I mean I suppose I could use the extra remaining unused directions, but that means I can fit a total of 4 different images into one active. So instead of 100 active objects for 100 different hats, it would be like 25 active objects.