Okay, on my last game project, my team and I made a 2D game with animating sprites. These animating sprites were made from good old .bmp files. Anyway, the problem was that the artists did not have a program where they could test out their animations, except within the actual game. The only animation tool they did have was imageready. This saved files in .jpg (or was it .gif), but we weren''t able to load these into our game. See the problem? I was thinking about making a small animation utility for them, where they could load up bitmap files and order the animation and watch it animate. However, this was about a month ago, and now I want to do this for fun. I was thinking about making this utility with slightly more features such as a compile button, once pushed would create an html document documenting all the created animations. This would include info to help the programmer program the bitmap animation into the game, since they need to know the frame orderings and length of each frame. Also, I want to make a feature where it combines several smaller bitmaps into a bigger 256x256 pixel bitmap to save memory. My question is, is there already a tool that does this or meets the same need? If not what are other features that a tool like this would need? Thanks a lot for any feedback!

Dunno. I found Promotion (www.cosmigo.com) to be pretty good. It only supports 256 colours, though, but you can create separate animation files for each i.e. character.

Also, it''s a demo version that CAN write an animation file, which is easy to figure out. I recommend you buy it though, if you find it useful.

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Well perhaps this would do, just write a small demo program...like one that simple takes a path to the sprite (file name or full pathname) and then it rips the sprites compiiles the images and plays them, and u could map each animation to a key, like say running left is animation 0, so u type 0 on the keypad and it loops through the runing left animation till u exit or not, uc ould have it put up grids, coordiantes and the like...


Id suspect writing such a porgram would be useful and worth the time, since you have like a real artist working for you and stuff

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Original post by llyod
Dunno. I found Promotion (www.cosmigo.com) to be pretty good. It only supports 256 colours, though, but you can create separate animation files for each i.e. character.

Also, it''s a demo version that CAN write an animation file, which is easy to figure out. I recommend you buy it though, if you find it useful.

2DNow - Forums, IOTDs and Articles for, and by, 2D game developers!

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I went to the www.cosmigo.com website and I couldn''t find Promotion. Does it work with bitmap files? I''m not really trying to create animation files... I''m trying to make a program that works as a testbed for trying out animations. Then the programmer by knowing what the frame ordering is can hardcode it into the game, well okay maybe hardcoding isn''t a good idea and an animation file would be better.

CodeJoy
-Sadly, I didn''t have a real artist working for me. I just had two programmers do the art. Oh well.

http://www.cosmigo.com/promotion/

I agree with codejoy. If you guys got the animation working in the game, then it should be a snap to pull out that piece of the code and make simple little test app.

Another little trick you could try is find an app that will allow to create an animated gif file and test the spites that way.