Most efficient method for animated images?

[Konidias]

I've got a little problem... I'm trying to load a lot of external images and then animate them all on the screen. The issue I have is that I get around like 30 of these on screen and the FPS starts to nosedive. This is using Direct3D 9 and HWA, latest build.

I believe the problem is that I'm using the animated picture object... which I believe is not optimized for HWA? So is there any solution to this? I'm really confused as to why this isn't a core feature in MMF. I would imagine a lot of people would like to load external sprite sheets and display them animating without massive slowdown.

I'm not sure using active objects would be much better, but even if they were...

1. the latest build of MMF doesn't let you import sprite sheets via boxmode in the active object image editor.

2. it would be an immense pain in the butt having to load each sprite sheet into the active object, setting up a place for it in the animations, and then if I ever needed to change the image, I'd have to go back and reload it into the active object.

So.... any ideas?

[Nifflas]

If there's a way to, I'd sure like to know. I've been using internally stored graphics in way more games than I wanted to.

[Pixelthief]

Creating a program that splices your sprite sheets into individual images, then loading those images into an active object, is probably the only way to do that efficiently.

[Nifflas]

A program should never have to split a file into a several smaller files and then load them individually into the same object. I'd never settle for a workaround like that.

[Konidias]

Yeah, anything short of just loading the sprite sheets directly into MMF seems like a huge waste of time. This is the year 2011 and I just find it hard to believe that a program that's been around for 5 years still doesn't have a reliable way to load external sprite sheets at runtime and animate them. This seems like a no-brainer feature

[Pixelthief]

Its perfectly codeable as an extension, simply nobody has done it yet.

[Konidias]

I would seriously pay money for it.

[Pixelthief]

Its really not all that complicated. At any rate, heres an example in MMF2;
https://sites.google.com/site/claniraq/stuff/SpriteExample.rar?attredirects=0&d=1

[Konidias]

Nice example, except it doesn't work with alpha images... It leaves a black cruddy outline around the sprites.

[Pixelthief]

You have to set the surface object to use an alpha channel O_o Its got a million options