GIF Animator

General
21


Made in Kinesis Animator. :smiley:

Edit: Hmm, maybe this topic should be moved to the graphics board? The program’s usable enough that you can completely make an animation with it, load it, and reuse it.

Edit: Has now integrated Auto-Find Sprites after deciding it might be a load better to make an Auto-Find Sprites function that doesn’t require predrawn boxes.

22

Triple post! So hey, it’s been ten days, and I’ve hardly done a thing with it due to excessive business.

But today, I went ahead and borrowed someone else’s code as I’ve done several times already, and I integrated that person’s animated-GIF-loading function into the Kinesis Animator with, as usual, some minor modifications. :slight_smile: I also added a little bit more to the “Random Help” file included with the program, and I definitely fixed all the bugs I knew of.

The download has been updated, of course.

23

Awesome! A new icon and everything.

Some bugs:

  • After loading an animated GIF, I can’t seem to edit the temp image in Paint, since it’s looking for it in one directory back
  • If you load an animated GIF, click the “new” button and try to add a box from the temp image to the new animation. You’ll get run-time error 9: subscript out of range.
  • When a scrollbar isn’t grayed out but takes up its entire bar length (meaning still unusable), you can click and hold it and drag off for another window-dragging glitch.

I have yet to use KinAnim for anything useful, but it’s complete enough by now that I certainly could. :smiley:

24

Fixed Paint problem.
Couldn’t reproduce that run-time error 9 glitch; didn’t fix it (unless I accidentally did somehow).
Fixed all window-moving glitches.

Additionally, fixed the frames’ names’ auto-refresh. (When it loads an animated GIF, they are automatically named “Copied from Box #.”) Also fixed almost unnoticeable bug–it didn’t ask the user if he or she wanted to save the BXS file, after an animated GIF was imported, unless it was modified afterward.

Reuploaded.

So… My to-do list is small again:

Re-enable and fix Global Color Tables option (if you’re lucky)
Enable and make Click and Drag Frames option (maybe–and I keep forgetting about it)

I feel I may also make a small animated GIF overlay program to complement it, instead of making the background image function. In other words, it would put one image (animated GIF or not) beneath another (animated GIF or not) and get a least common multiple of their display time and calculate the appropriate timing. You could achieve the effect in a web browser just by using DIV tags to overlay one graphic on another, but this way, it’d all be in one file, and you wouldn’t have to use a web browser to see it correctly.

Edit: Well, I found out that Carles P.V. (from whom I got nearly all of my GIF-saving code) has actually made a far more complete animated GIF saving program–and a GIF optimizer. So I’m not going to do that, and fixing the Global Color Tables would never have been a problem if I had used that newer code from the start. Anyway, I’m probably going to loop through each frame that has its own local palette and replace each color with the respective index of that color in the global palette. Ought to solve the problem, but it might take a few milliseconds longer than otherwise.

25

It’s been a while, and I got bored, so I went ahead and added the input file reading and drag-and-drop (to the spritesheet area) abilities. So now, you can set your BXSs and KAFs (or GIFs, PNGs, and BMPs) to open with Kinesis Animator.

26

LOL that snowman’s great! What is Kinesis Animator? Anyway, your GIFA sounds great! Have you given it a name yet?

27

Kinesis Animator is the name of my GIF animator, dude. :slight_smile:

28

DUH now you know that I only read the last post in topics… sorry about that.

29

I was super impressed until I couldn’t preview or save my animation. The auto-box finding thing is INSANELY awesome and useful though. I’ve been manually copy/pasting each frame all my life. Help?
EDIT: I imported a .gif if that helps, with no transparency and 2 colors (not counting boxes)
EDIT2: The preview works fine if I just use the arrow keys to slide it back and forth, but it refuses to play it…
EDIT3: Autofind boxes broke when I changed something in the options (deleting the options file fixed it). Wtf.
EDIT4: XD

30

I keep getting an error message while trying to import my PNG spritesheet. “Error while loading.”

31

You (edit: um, supposedly…the accurate preview ignores this fact) can’t preview an animation with either a frame’s Duration set to 0 or “Duration of Master Frame” set to 0, because it’s really impossible to get an accurate preview of how that would look if it loops. Browsers really break the GIF specifications, because a delay of 0 is supposed to really mean 0–most browsers won’t display faster than 10.

Auto-Find Boxes is affected by two options: “Draw All Boxes With Color” and “Add sprites as frames automatically when found.” Turning off the former makes the boxes impossible to see without clicking on them. Turning off the latter will prevent boxes from being added to the frame roster unless you specifically click Add Box As Frame. Both are checked by default.

Hah. Forgetfulness. Fixes that lack of a cancel button.

PNG loading is handled by a separate procedure that is tried and true…I wonder what that could be caused by. You wanna send me your PNG so I can see why it screws up?

Also fixed the Slow Play button.

Uploaded.

I’m still pondering the “add background” function I wanted… I dunno, though. It’ll either be not flexible enough or too hard. :stuck_out_tongue:

32

Heh, I could always get the preview to work at 0 ms per frame. It would just play super-fast.

I was actually having trouble with the animator a couple nights ago, though. I saved an animated GIF and opened up a preview in WinPaFViewer, only to find that it wouldn’t animate. I tried a bunch of stuff out to see what I could do and nothing seemed to work. Opening the GIF as a sheet in KinAnim worked normally though–all the frames lined up in boxes. I finally got it to work by making the height larger with some extra rows of white. A problem with KinAnim, or a problem with Windows Picture and Fax Viewer? It was the full crate leaking phazon animation I posted in the Artifacts topic, if you’re interested.

33

Ah, yes, sounds like the Logical Screen was too small… I’ll work on that and update this post later with whatever I found out.

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btw… did you check your pms?

LOL

LOL

i just realized what i wrote…

Did you check your PMs?

35

Download it again and try it now. I increased the max path length from 255 to 511.

36

My frame lengths were set properly, I checked that. I’ll maybe upload everything I was working with and you can see if it’s maybe just my computer’s fault.

37

Timaster:

I checked out the files you sent me, used the same EXE ‘n’ all. The Accurate Preview worked fine, and the Live Preview only worked after I checked it in the options and restarted the program–so there’s something I’ll fix in a minute.

Saving the animation worked fine. Exporting it as bitmaps also worked. Try doing it in a higher-level directory, perhaps? I don’t know about the length limits of some of the code I used, because I’m not used to having exceptionally long path names. :stuck_out_tongue:

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I’ll test in-depth for you and tell you exactly what I did. It’s likely just a fault of my computer’s, though, in some way.

39

When i got the program, extracted it, and launched it, i got this:

whats up with that

40

Did I say that? Whoops <_<