Saturday 17 August 2013

Yet another in house tool created

Not been long since my last post, but I thought you all might like to know about my newest in house tool that will save me a lot of time in the future.
First of all, the reasoning behind it: both Monkey and BlitzMax have the facility to import animation strips for using with your sprites. These are images which hold all the frames of a particular animation, so that you can load them at once, rather than having to load multiple images, which is a lot slower.
The concept behind it is dead easy, each frame of the animation has the same height and width, and therefore, the image is easy to break up into the individual frames as the animation progresses. The downside of this is the time it can take to manually create an animation strip, particularly if you have a lot of frames, it is not uncommon to use 15 separate frames just for walking in a single direction. Below is an example of the animation strip I used when I created Mr Wong's Loopy Laundry:
As you can see, there are 59 frames to animate Mr Wong. I created this by hand and it took quite a time.


So, to help ease this process, I have written a small program I call Image Stitcher. I guess you could call it the sister program of Image Slicer. What it allows me to do, is import each of the frames, select the output height and width of the frames (in case I decide to enlarge or shrink them), the drawing style (scaled - maintaining aspect ration, stretched or cropped) and the number of columns in the animation strip. This is then exported as a single image, like the one above.

As you can already see, this is a massive time saver, that will hopefully save me hours of work.
As with my other tools, it was written with Xojo.

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