Our transparent animated gif problem...

[Stitches]

Hi guys. I've spent the last week scouring the net for help with attempting to code something to solve the transparent animated gif problem. Whilst we always look at alpha channels and compressed images via gimp, I have been wondering whether- just for the time being, it would be useful to try to make a plugin for on screen sprites. Kind of like the animated gif plugin AM has, but with transparency support. I obviously am having trouble and most likely going over things I'm sure you guys here have already pickled your heads over... but what the smeg...

I found this article on the subject from microsoft...
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vbteam/archive/ ... gertz.aspx

As far as I can tell there might be a way to do the transparent via colour gif animation. I scoured and couldn't find anything to create some kind of controller or something to allow for PNG images. From the rhetoric about, it would appear there are folks all over having the PNG/animated gif transparency problem when it comes to VBScript. If there are any expert programmers with a spare ten minutes there to go over that code and tutorial above, perhaps you can figure some way to allowing for a hotspot to have this feature. I dunno... maybe it's staring us right in the face. Or maybe I'm just pickled here.

[Vengeance66]

I used video for animations. In one game I had GIF animation, but I found that if you have transition, the would become white. Then, I tried using more than one animation on one frame, and I couldn't find a solution. Simon gave me the idea of using video for animations. It's great and it's working!

[reneuend]

Ditto!
I also have been creating videos and using them in hotspots. It's interesting some of the things you can do with this. You'll soon see what I mean if I ever get my projects finished!

[Stitches]

I'm using the video method myself anyhow. But I've been on the bimble, since until PNG support is available (which looking about it appears grim) the transparent animated gif thing would really open the software up. Even if just a wee plugin. So I need a coder with a little time. Somebody who can make sense of source code and such. I've noticed that most engines like Adventure game studio use what the old amiga games used- a sprite wheel. A selection of images with a single alpha colour background. We have all seen them. Now I found this source code (though no idea what to do with it) which pertains to masks. I wondered if there would be a way to integrate something like this into our animated gif plugin. Somebody out there have a gander. I don't know if this has been tried but something about the descriptions made me think about it.


*****Edit I found 2 other source codes.*"***
Within these zips may be just the right thing to inspire one of the coders on here... maybe... Agh! Straws... just out of... my reach! :v

Reasons for having animated transparent gif hotspots:

Sprites (with collision and movement plugins working to assist)
Make switches graphics improve
Allow for more unique 3rd person plugin

This could be accomplished with just the ability to make the animated gifs transparent. If a hotspot could be a moving sprite of 256 colour (until some clever bobs works out the code for PNG stuff) it could make for all sorts of versatility in our games. The video overlay method is very restrictive if you're using the 3rd person plugin. It can never cross over.