Redoing the player in Flash

[Nevfx]

Yes. It's just a backend change that allows for better improvements.

Ah, thats good. XD

[Meph]

I think you might need to correct your BBCode in your post.

[Nevfx]

...

How the hell did that happen.

[henke37]

So I feel like actually doing this. But the issue I have first is the animations.

What I mean here is a lot of small things. The first being, what is the correct framerate? The second is, how should I get the animation data? I need to know what picture to show when and for how long. And I need proper pictures too. As in clearly separated and aligned bitmaps. Not the mess that unofficial sprite sheets has. The best would be to read the animations directly from the game data itself. Anyone know someone with tools for that?

[henke37]

Surprise surprise! Guess what?

I actually did it! (old version)

I have a working cross exam system now. I will just add in objections before making the next release. Also, expect a feature that no other trial player has.

[Meph]

Also, expect a feature that no other trial player has.

It's almost as though you're... bribing us. I have to admit, however, that this is intriguing.

[henke37]

No, I am not bribing. I am just teasing. Btw, I forgot to thank you for providing with the hosting, thanks Meph.

But there is one thing that I do need assistance with. That is getting the animations in order. As will be more and more obvious, I have no clue how fast the animations should run. So, I need help deciding on the framerate to use for the player. The acceptable range is 24 to 60 frames per second. Once that is settled, the animations themself need to be scaled to work at that rate. I will need either someone with Flash that can directly tweak things or someone who thinks that it will be exciting to write screen after screen of animation data into a text file that I can manually read and apply.

[Meph]

The framerate depends on the FPS for animated GIFs in Firefox.

And you're welcome.

[Unas]

The framerate depends on the FPS for animated GIFs in Firefox.

Why are you talking about framerates in GIF files ?
In an animated GIF, each frame has its own length set. It's not "change frame every x milliseconds" with x a global value, it's "jump to the next frame in x milliseconds", with x a property of the current frame.

If that can help, usually the lowest possible interval between two frames is 10ms, but that's not part of the GIF spec as far as I know, it's just a common use because lower values use the processor too much.

Once that is settled, the animations themselves need to be scaled to work at that rate. I will need either someone with Flash that can directly tweak things or someone who thinks that it will be exciting to write screen after screen of animation data into a text file that I can manually read and apply.

Can't you read the data contained in the gif file at runtime, to know what's the length of each frame and then round "length of the gif frame * your flash framerate" to get the number of your frames that'll be used by that gif frame ?
Doing that at runtime would avoid the need to prepare all data like you're wanting to.

[Meph]

The framerate depends on the FPS for animated GIFs in Firefox.

Why are you talking about framerates in GIF files ?

Oh! Sorry! I meant to say the "FPS for Flash"

[henke37]

I could read the gif files. I am sure there is some library to extract the data out of them. But I want to have just one file to load for each character. This both in order to save bandwidth (requests are not free) and to allow data sharing. True, there will be some unused, yet loaded, assets, but the file will be cached soon enough and most of the time, there will be more used ones than unused ones.

Of course, I am still thinking that some of the characters should be split.

I am also using a fair amount of scripting in the character animations to ensure that they will interact just right.

[ThePaSch]

Of course, I am still thinking that some of the characters should be split.

You mean, like, in half?

[henke37]

I mean that groups of poses should be split into separate characters. For example, when there is different clothes. For some reason, people want the clothes to stay the same.

[ThePaSch]

Ah, I see.

For some reason, people want the clothes to stay the same.

Can't think of any reason why people would want such a thing.

[henke37]

It's called constiency. People tend to note when things changes with no explanation.