Gimp animation plugin
I needed to create some sprite
animations, so I decided to use something existing instead of
writing my own. Good animator isn’t only able to animate
pictures, but should also have image editing abilty, so that you
can change and test in most productive way. I found that Gimp has
such plugin, so I decided to give it a try. It does work, but I ran
into several problems:
1. Image size. When set to animate,
the Videoframe Playback window only allows images to be bigger
than 64x64 pixels. Why is this limitation escapes me. My sprites
are 25x25 and look very ugly especially since enlargement to 64x64
blurs the pixels.
2. Nagging audio dialog. Yes, every time
I run the animation I get the stupid:
No audiosupport available
the audioserver executable file ‘wavplay’ was not found.
If you have installed ‘wavplay 1.4’
you should add the installation dir to your PATH
or set environment variable WAVPLAYPATH to the name of the executable
before you start GIMP
…message, and have to click OK. No I
don’t have it installed, I don’t want to install it
and I don’t need audio. I just want to animate a bunch of
25x25 sprites for my game. Even better, the Enable checkbox
on audio tab isn’t checked. Looks like the authors want us to
use the cool audio feature so much, that they made the whole animation
thing quite annoying if you decided that you don’t need
it.
3. Gimp has some cool animation stuff
in Script-fu -> Animators. The only problem is that
it creates the animation frames as image layers. Apparently, the only
way to make animation from it is to manually copy/paste each of those
layers to animation. Not much fun when it has 20+
frames.
Anyway, I’m looking for a replacement,
if you know any, please let me know.