Editor Guide — Animation Editor
[ Toolbars ]
Animation Basics
Animations (*.anm) are simply a sequence of 'still' images that are displayed consecutively to give the impression of motion, just like films or tv. Animations are used for player and item movements, and player and enemy actions in battles, and can be used for animated intro sequences and menu objects.
Animations can be composed of image files, such as jpg or gif (note there is no animated gif support) or tiles, or Tile Bitmaps (collections of tiles). The format itself only consists of links to the frame images rather than the images themselves, so you will need to keep the images files you use.
Around the Editor
The current frame is displayed in the centre of the editor. To load or change the frame image, click the frame and a dialog will appear. When starting, the animation has 'zero' frames, as indicated by counter in the lower toolbar, displaying current and total frame numbers. After adding a frame, the frame count is increased to 1/1. To add a second frame, click the "Next Frame" button in the left-hand toolbar and repeat the process.
Most animations you will be making will require some portion of them to be transparent, and each frame in the animation has an individual transparent colour associated with it. To set the transparent colour for a frame, hit the "Select" button in the toolbar, and click the transparent colour in the image. As a useful touch, the transparent colour of the previous frame is set when a new frame is added. The speed of the animation; that is, how quickly the frames are cycled through, is set by the slider on the toolbar.
Often when creating characters and enemies using tiles the image takes up more than one tile, however you may discover that it is not currently possible to place more than one tile in an animation's frame at a time - so how is it possible to create character animations with more than one tile? The answer is to use Tile Bitmaps - which can be chosen as images for frames like the other image types. See the Tile Bitmap Editor for more information.
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Toolbars
| Previous Frame - Displays the previous frame in the animation. | |
| Next Frame - Displays the next frame in the animation, and used to add new frames to the end of the animation. | |
| Play Animation - Plays the animation through once. | |
| Insert Frame - Inserts a new frame before the current frame. | |
| Delete Frame - Deletes the current frame and moves subsequent frames up. |
Size - Sets the dimensions of the animation. Frames are stretched or compressed to fit the size.
Settings -
- Frame delay slider - Sets the length of time each frame of the animation is shown for (same value for all frames).
- Sound - A WAV sound effect can be chosen to play with each frame. Click the text box to show an open file dialog, hit the "X" button next to this to delete the sound effect.
- Frame transparent colour - The transparent colour of the current frame (can be different for each frame). Hit the "Select" button and then click the required area on the frame to set the transparent colour. The current frame and total number of frames is displayed below.
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