puggsoy's Bottomless Top Hat Of Sprites

[Previous]

You can always set a maximum width and break to a new line when it is reached?
I do that with my FE:SD battle animations, when the line reaches 2032 pixels, it jumps to the next line. Of course you should use a larger maximum (like 10000 maybe) :P
Or break after X frames (you could even get X by dividing the number of frames of the animation by four, hoping all directions use the same amount of frames).

Mighty Jetters, how often do I have to tell you.
The File extension does not define the fily type. I suppose Minus added .bin so their file detection thingy can determine it should be a download-to-harddrive file instead of viewing it in the browser. Just get rid of the .bin, leave .png and open it in Photoshops, GIMP or IrfanView or whatever you have that takes large images.

[Garamonde]

Mighty Jetters, how often do I have to tell you.
The File extension does not define the fily type. I suppose Minus added .bin so their file detection thingy can determine it should be a download-to-harddrive file instead of viewing it in the browser. Just get rid of the .bin, leave .png and open it in Photoshops, GIMP or IrfanView or whatever you have that takes large images.

I'M SORRY OKAY I SAID MY MEMORY SUCKS.
But honestly I just didn't want to download that huge thing anyway. :c

[puggsoy]

It's for all directions, as I said there's no way to automatically separate the directions, so I can't put them on separate lines. Therefore all of the directions are on one.
And yeah as Previous said the BIN file is just a renamed PNG, if you remove the .bin extension you can just view it as normal. But yeah 50MB is hefty.

You can always set a maximum width and break to a new line when it is reached?
I do that with my FE:SD battle animations, when the line reaches 2032 pixels, it jumps to the next line. Of course you should use a larger maximum (like 10000 maybe) :P
Or break after X frames (you could even get X by dividing the number of frames of the animation by four, hoping all directions use the same amount of frames).

With all the previous sheets before doing this, I did make a maximum width, but it was depending on the sheet. I got the area of all the frames put together, got the square root of that, and made that the maximum width, resulting in a square-ish sheet.
As for breaking after X frames by dividing by four, well, there are more than four directions and, uh, I'm not exactly sure how many directions there are. I can probably figure out how many, and all enemies probably have the same number of directions, but the thing is not all animations have directions, as you can see the first Rattle-tail animation (emerge) is only in that one direction. Effects or projectiles such as that rock also count as animations.

So yah, as far as I can see the only option is what I originally did, the square-ish sheets. However if we do settle on that I might need to split up bigger sheets like the Lunkhead and Scumbag, so how should I do that?

[Garamonde]

If there are only that many for walking animations, that'd warrant a sheet in itself (labeled "Rattle-tail (Walk/Walking)" or something). Then have the rest of the actions on the second sheet?
But, if the frames stretch out that much horizontally then I don't think that'd be very suitable. I'm not sure what you could do about that honestly, other than .ZIPing them and of course as we know sheets are probably easier to use in this case so...

[puggsoy]

Well the only real reason I've been wanting to put each animation on it own line in the first place is because it might be difficult for people who want to animate to align the sprites properly. However I think having the sprites organised is already good enough actually, even if they're not aligned across rows, in any case it's better than the original sheets. And anyway the only way we're going to get them all aligned is with a super-wide sheet, which is out of the question.

One thing I can do is give each animation its own "paragraph", so that one animation's "OriginalSize" doesn't mess with the others' (which is actually how this started). That is, I can just organise the sheet as normal, making a new line when it gets too wide, but once an animation is finished I can start another line, effectively pressing "Enter" every time it reaches a new animation.
It may not be perfect, and there will be some blank space, but it's more compact than a single line for each animation and will still make it relatively easy for animators. If you want I can even add a line to the bottom of each animation box, so that people can align them properly.

What d'you think?

[Garamonde]

Well uh, I suppose anything is better than 80k pixels wide, so go for it!

[Previous]

Sure thing, puggsoy! Just wait until I can put my batle animations up, those aren't too well sorted, either, but follow the same schematic.

[puggsoy]

There you have it. Organised and aligned. And no, I didn't draw the line over the frames, I actually increased the height by a pixel so that it's just touching the bottom. And now that the animations are "paragraphed" the lines are also just touching the top of the animations below them, so people can know the height of the frames. With a little counting and division they can also know the width of each frame, of course I could also put lines for that but then each frame would be in a box and I'm not sure if that would look too nice.
In any case the sheet is now usable for animation

I have to come back to this question though: what do I do with large sheets (which are originally multiple sheets)? Do you want me to split them up, and if so, how?

[Garamonde]

That looks brilliant.
And uhh... how many sheets was it made up of originally...? I'm not sure if I can offer much in the way or suggestions about this but maybe you could do it the same way? And if not, either split them by action or just make them part 1, 2, etc.? It's hard to tell without seeing them for myself but, yeah that's pretty much all I can say for the moment.

[puggsoy]

Well the Rattle-tail one is just made up of a single sheet, but for example the Lunkhead is made out of two, which I submitted earlier. Those were just like that but now with my program it merges them together. The thing is I could split them into separate sheets by animations, but due to animations being of different sizes this could result in one sheet containing a few frames and the other containing heaps.

However, would you mind if I just split the sheets up by the number of frames or rows? This would keep them pretty much evenly sized, but it would also cut off some animations, i.e. a walk animation could start in one sheet and finish in the other. This would be nice and clean, but it could confuse people.

[Previous]

Aren't you overthinking a little

I'd say if you have an excetionally large sheet, open it, check for the vertical center, see where the nearest animation break is and split it up there?

Go by your guts!

[puggsoy]

I was thinking of that too. I gave it a go with the Lunkhead sheet but unfortunately there's an animation in the centre of the sheet which takes up most of the sheet. That is, if I were to cut it off from the top or bottom of this animation, one of the resulting sheets would contain this massive animation plus a few other smaller ones, and the other resulting sheet would just contain a few smaller ones.

HOWEVER this did give me an idea. Since the animations aren't in any particular order, I can cut out any animations I want and arrange them into new sheets how I want. So for the Lunkhead sheet I can rip out that massive animation in the center, give it its own sheet, and make another sheet containing the other smaller ones. That way they'll be more equally sized.

I'll do this now and see how it goes.

[Garamonde]

Yeah if they aren't related to eachother then do whatever you want with them. I don't understand all this technical stuff anyway.

[puggsoy]

Hrm.

Well I did it and it looks good now, two fairly even sheets. But there's another problem. When I try to make the Scumbag sheet using my awesome new alignment method, with the paragraphs and lines and all, it doesn't want to work. Simply put it looks like it's surpassing the maximum image dimensions for the object that saves the file. And even though the documentation says that with the version of Flash I'm using the limit should depend on the user's PC, I'm not getting an error that seems to say it's my PC's fault, so I don't know what's going on.

So yeah that's annoying. I'll say when I figure it out.

[puggsoy]

After some really troublesome searching and debugging and testing and stuff, I've ended up just splitting the sheet into halves and then putting it together in GIMP. Then I can split up the animations like with the Lunkhead sheet.

Thing is, the walk animation takes up more than half the sheet, so unfortunately I won't be able to split it up into more than 2 sheets, even though there are originally 4 sheets. Therefore the images will be larger than I'd like, since the plan was to split it up so that we essentially have the original sheets, organised. I suppose that's the price for organisation though.

So yeah, if we have no further requirements I guess I can start re-submitting now. I'd upload examples to show what I've got but they're really massive. Although I guess if you really want I can just make scaled down versions to show you the gist.