Animations

 

Animations are collections of frames that can be “played” through.  The Animation Control Box is used to manipulate Animations.

 

Animations are lifted directly from specially arranged Images using the Animsnip Tool.

 

Animations may have a maximum of 3000 frames.

 

Animations are saved according to the rules that Blitz Basic will use to load “Animshapes”.

When you save an Animation, you’ll be told the command that should be used in Blitz to load it.  BPaint will arrange the frames on to a bitmap not more than 640 pixels wide.  BPaint draws the frames directly from this bitmap.  It is arranged this way because some machines have difficulty working with images wider than the screen display.  Thanks go to xMystic for pointing this out.

When an Animation is loaded, you’ll be asked to define the size of a single frame.  BPaint needs to know this to retrieve the frames.

The fact that the animations are arranged in a rectangle to save them means that BPaint will load any “spare” frames that appear it the end of an animation to fill this shape.  This won’t affect the way that Blitz loads them.

 

The Animations that are stored are used as tiles when editing maps.  Because all frames within one Animation must be the same size, being able to use multiple Animations allows you to use different sized blocks when designing maps.

 

Stored Animations can be drawn back to the Image for editing using the Animplot Tool.

 

Up to 9 Animations can be stored at once.

 

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