just a couple questions for the experts around here: is it possible to use animated gifs for conversation backgrounds and battle frames?
asking 'cause i know that these kind of assets are usually .png files due to GBA restrictions, but since the final battle against the fire dragon in FE7 has an animated flaming background, i was curious about how that was achieved, and if it was eventually possible to reproduce similar effects by using animated gifs.
wether it’s doable or not in the “classic” engine, in Tactile or anywhere else, any sort of info will be much appreciated.
Most bg layer animations that you see are typically palette cycling or screen scrolling, but sometimes it’s a true animation. You can create some pretty cool effects by having a static image that has its colours change constantly.
The fire dragon appears to be a static background that is being distorted every scanline, so that is possible though probably not easy. Truly animated backgrounds would be harder still but no reason you couldn’t do it in terms of gba hardware
If the change can be handled by palette animation, I think it is better because the capacity is small.
However, palette animation is very difficult to make unless you are used to it.
I think that the best thing for the creator is the function to display one picture continuously like normal animation data, but it increases the amount of data.
Animated BGs are really neat.
If you’d like to check out a complex example of wacky animation with a BG, check out the blue text box that scrolls up from the bottom of the screen in the world map prologue. It does some neat stuff with scanlines and palette cycling to accomplish the gradient effect, and it messes with the BG offset for the smooth scroll in. (It’s really complicated, though and is probably more than you’re bargaining for )
An easier approach would be to cycle the tiles themselves which would be more appropriate for a general backdrop or UI frame. Palette cycling is another good option and is used very frequently in vanilla (for example glowing green stats use this).
So yeah animated UI and backdrops are definitely doable - very complex examples are even implemented in vanilla - how difficult they are to implement, though, depends on how hard you’re willing to work for them.
so basicly making animated UIs and background by using .gif files is out of question due to technical reasons, at least for the classic engine.
not sure about Tactile, but since i’m not familiar with hacking tools and engines knowledge, for the time being i guess i’ll just focus on other stuff.
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