Animation in LiveCode

[Richmond]

On 05/01/16 03:43, Sannyasin Brahmanathaswami wrote:
> Richmond:
>
> Yes of course that would work, but moving the animated GIF around on top of a video? Player

I don't see why that shouldn't be possible: after all, if I've actually 
got one thing right it is that a layer is a layer
and they don't interact with one another.

>
> FYI: your tiger has this white rectangular border that flashes on each cycle through the frames. I turned off the border width and the 3D etc in the inspector, but it did not go away. Perhaps one of the GIF frames has a border?

Well, to be honest, that's just "any old GIF" I grabbed off the internet 
to make my "proof of concept" stack.

That whole 'thing' took me about 10 minutes - after all, it is not 
rocket science.

The flashing frame is a nuisance; and IF I were to use that sort of 
thing I would
NOT use something I grabbed off the internet but roll my own.

>
> Otherwise the outer glow on top of the grass is very effective.

I set the outer glow because without it the tiger was very difficult to see.

>
> Indeed looking around the web: animated GIF is still very much alive and well. And here I thought it was a fading, “retro” format… but people are even making little animated GIFS from movies.
>
> So the answer to the artists team is “assets must be animated GIF.”

There are any number of online tools for assembling a series of static 
GIF images into an animated GIF,
and several FREE downloadable ones if you feel funny about people 
getting their paws on your images
when you upload them.

For the sake of argument GIMP [which is multi-platform and Free] (the 
program I know and love) can churn out animated GIFs without too
much of a learning curve.

https://www.gimp.org/downloads/

>
> This will be a challenge for some, depending on their skill set and tool box.
>
> Midnight-Rises graphic novel game trailer is also interesting in that it has *zero* moving images…  but the parallax effect was used in some scenes to great effect… the simple use of having 2D images with transparency slide onto the scene from left or right worked well too.
>
>
>

At the risk of sounding a bit goofy: I do think that if you are trying 
to put together a kit for children to make
wee animated "thingies" the simpler the underlying stuff the better.

As animated GIFs have a long pedigree, and are not doing the 'coming and 
going' thing that Flash seems to be doing,
it is best to rely on them.

Obviously from my silly tiger you would then have to delve into 
frame-rates and so on.

However, it should not be unduly difficult to set up an import stack 
that allowed and end-user (a child ???)
to bring in their pre-prepared animated GIF and set all sorts of 
parameters before deploying it in their
piece of work.

Richmond.