Software Woes

Rants, tips and tricks



Wednesday, April 04, 2007



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.