Lurking In The Background

[Pete Holland Jr.]

Well, this is weird. I'm starting with the actors animations. I'm doing okay, I think. I have the GIMP creating animations, that is going just fine. They play like dreams under Internet Explorer, which I use to check that they run fine.

First, some background--I created four frames of a character walking to practice making animated gif's with. They are small pictures, about 80 pixels square. Simple cartoon character with a solid background color.

The problem comes when I try to add the animations to the game. There was an odd flash every once in a while. I slowed down the frames per second, and noticed something--the first frame of the animation, it lops off any background color (including if the color occurs in the character). For example, if the color is purple, the first frame doesn't have the color purple at all. If the color is white, the background vanishes, as does the character's eyes. All the other frames show the full background colors filling things in. When I look at the animated .gif under Internet Explorer, it shows the background color at all times. For some reason, Game Editor ignores the background color for the first frame and remembers it for the others.

I'm thinking that what I need to do is make the background color transparent. That should fix the whole problem, because it won't matter if GE skips the background or displays it, it'll be invisible either way. The instructions for Windows paint don't help--I tried in a variety of file formats, and nothing worked. Under the GIMP, I can get transparency, but if I use the resulting GIF's to make an animation with the layer thing from a previous post, it doesn't animate under Internet Explorer and I can't import it into Game Editor.

I am clearly overlooking something, but I can't figure out what. Can anyone help me either 1) erase the background color in all frames of the Game Engine rendering process or 2) make animated GIF with a transparent background that animate? I would rather do this than several files because I not only have some trouble setting it to animate from multiple files, but I would rather have the animations all in one place for convenience sake. Anyone have any ideas? I'm doubting I have to make the background color on the screen black and the background of the actor black.

[makslane]

The Game Editor's gif importer have some problems, but you can try make the gif with a transparent background.