Animated LVZ's

[Disturbance]

I wonder if there's any step by step guide on creating an animated lvz's, it's not so much the .ini file part but the whole thing, I can create an animated gif... not sure about animated bmp's, the animation file would be HUGE if i used bmp's seeing as it's a fairly decent sized graphic 800x613... so where do I start?

 

Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.

[Samapico]

Check your Continuum\Graphics folder, and open some of the files in there. You can safely rename them from .bm2 to .bmp.

Basically, all the animation frames are in the bmp, tiled horizontally and vertically. In the ini file, you only have to specify the number of horizontal and vertical frames in the bitmap.

If your 800x613 animation has a lot of frames, I'd try to think of another way, cause it will become a huge 20000x20000 bitmap

I suggest you split your animation to make several small animations. They can be started at the same time to be synchronized.

[ThunderJam]

Ok you got two parts to worry about: The image, and the .ini file.

 

IMAGE:

It actually will be one static image, not a animated .gif. Say the effect you want to create is 100x100, and the animated has 8 frames to it. Make a new image that is 100x800, basically one image that can hold every frame. Using photoshop or paintshop you can use a grid function to visually separate each frame for your simplicty. The frames can be one after another vertically or horizontally, it does not matter because you will specify which in the .ini file of your lvz.

 

the .INI:

you define the object in the [OBJECT] or w/e section, that defines the things you can use in mapobjects and screenobjects. I can't remember off the top of my head, but the last 3 or so fields in the syntax for declaring an object are "x frames", "y frames", and "animation time." Use the x and y to specify how tall or wide your image of frames is. It will automatically divide your image by pixels then depending on how many frames you specify. The animation time i BELIEVE is total time it spends on the whole animation... not time spent on each frame (could be wrong)

 

Oh and in terms of the filesize, it does not have to be a .bmp. I woudl suggest saving as a png or jpg, and you can also reduce the color depth to eliminate some of the filesize too.

[Samapico]

Oh and in terms of the filesize, it does not have to be a .bmp. I woudl suggest saving as a png or jpg, and you can also reduce the color depth to eliminate some of the filesize too.

True, but a huge-!@#$%^&* animation will still eat up all your RAM. Like a 20000x20000 picture or something like that. In memory, it is stored as bitmap data, so you get FPS lag, and the initial loading time is significantly longer... It happened to me when I made a big turret graphic that took up all the screen, with a radar aiming line. Even if the file was like 190k, the pic was something like 30000x15000 pixels, and the game froze for a few seconds just to load that image, and the FPS was horrible

So huge animations are to avoid... try to break it up in multiple animations to make it smaller

[tcsoccerman]

this might help

 

http://www.subspacedownloads.com/index.php...&c=make_lvz