A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Frames
Posted: Sun Sep 10, 2006 4:06 amI have another question, if you don't mind.
I have downloaded the demo version and am playing with it, experimenting to see what makes things tick. I'm starting simple, with the sprites or "actors" as they are known in your parlance.
I know from experience that doing the actual foreground graphics is the biggest learning curve after actual command syntax. The actors use animated bitmaps. What a relief compared to filling registers with binary characters.
Just one problem--I don't know how to make animated bitmaps. When I open them under the program GIMP, I see the frames stacked one on top of the other. It can't be that simple, there has to be a way to tell the OS that these are frames instead of a continuous strip of images. Online, I find instructions for making animated GIF's, but not BMP's. I understand GIF, BMP, and PNG support the "transparent" color, but JPG doesn't.
So....
1) Can it be any graphic image format (png, jpg, etc.) that is used, or only bmp's? After all, if any format will work, I might as well just make the GIF's and use those.
2) How do I make the actual animated files? Is there some program that does it, or is there a trick under the GIMP to make it happen?
I have downloaded the demo version and am playing with it, experimenting to see what makes things tick. I'm starting simple, with the sprites or "actors" as they are known in your parlance.
I know from experience that doing the actual foreground graphics is the biggest learning curve after actual command syntax. The actors use animated bitmaps. What a relief compared to filling registers with binary characters.
Just one problem--I don't know how to make animated bitmaps. When I open them under the program GIMP, I see the frames stacked one on top of the other. It can't be that simple, there has to be a way to tell the OS that these are frames instead of a continuous strip of images. Online, I find instructions for making animated GIF's, but not BMP's. I understand GIF, BMP, and PNG support the "transparent" color, but JPG doesn't.
So....
1) Can it be any graphic image format (png, jpg, etc.) that is used, or only bmp's? After all, if any format will work, I might as well just make the GIF's and use those.
2) How do I make the actual animated files? Is there some program that does it, or is there a trick under the GIMP to make it happen?