EXPERIMENTAL: Battle Animation Graphics Repo [Github Version - Need Feedback]

Resources Assets
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View the new Graphics Repository on Github!

Above, you will find the link to the update for the Battle Animation Repository that I promised many hours ago. Unfortunately, Google Drive crapped the bed, so I have to reupload everything. Of the 125,000 files in the Battle Animation repo, I have uploaded…

…6000! I have uploaded 6k of 125k. Wow! It took me three hours. Each of those files ranges between 1-2kb’s. This is unacceptable.

For the past three years, the Graphics Repository has become an important focal point of the FEU and fangame-making community. When I first posted the Repository, I only intended for it to better organize the resources we had, yet for some reason, the community started making battle animations and other resources waaaay more frequently. Perhaps simply having a group of fellow fans working diligently to update the repo made people want to contribute to it.

I don’t know why, but we went from maybe one or two new animations a month to somewhere in the range of twenty, thirty, or even forty new animations a month. The growth was completely unexpected and startling.

It solidified in my mind that the community is awesome, and that alone is worth its weight in diamonds. However, with so much new stuff going on with the Google Drive Repo, other issues began to crop up.

Simply put, Google Drive sucks. It sucks real bad. It is utter doo-doo. I have suffered with Gdrive for years. Anytime I want to upload a bunch of files, I cringe inwardly, knowing that its ungodly slow upload speeds will slow me down. I have fiber internet, understand. I can upload a 5GB video to youtube in, I dunno, like 5 minutes. But uploading 100MB’s of files to Google Drive? It has taken me two full days to upload a new version of the battle animation repo, and then google drive completely screwed up, and now I have to do it again.

Something has got to give. I’ve decided it’s time to look into alternatives.

Meet version 2 of the Battle Animation Repo. For now, it’s crude and in need of refining. However, it already has some marked improvements, even in this basic, elementary stage.

  1. Downloading files. If you want to download a file, your download speeds will be lightning fast. Downloading the entire repo off Gdrive will take you a full day or two, even with super fast internet, but cloning the repo for your own purposes with Github won’t take you half an hour, provided you have decent speed. Even if your net is slow, you’ll still have faster results with the Github than the old method.
  2. Uploading files. I uploaded the entire battle animation repo in two hours. Probably thirty minutes of that was just me setting up random assorted stuff and figuring out the ideal layout. So really, it took me 1.5 hours. Comparing 125,000 files in 1.5 hours to 6,000 in three hours… you can see the upload speed difference. It’s tens of times faster.
  3. Collaboration. Want to improve the Gdrive repo? Tough luck! It’s a pain in everyone’s ass and nobody likes doing it. But Github? Easy! Anyone can collaborate, and I’ve become somewhat adept with it, thanks to Tactile, Lex Talionis, and a bunch of other recent projects I cloned off Github. In terms of ‘community support,’ a Github is billions of times better than a Gdrive.
  4. Mass downloading. This sort of goes with Point #1, but if you want to download the WHOLE Repo from Gdrive, it’s a pain in the ass. With Github, you click clone, you download the drive… you’re done. Easy.

However, there is one downside for the new Repo, and it’s not insignificant.

With the Github repo, you cannot see pictures or gifs as previews. You’d have to click them directly.

No preview here:

Or here:

Or even here:

Only if you click an image or a gif will they play.

951×443

Compare that with the Gdrive…

1288×619

In the ‘tiled’ view, you can see image previews, so that’s kind of helpful.

That being said, I do not think this is necessarily a major downside. One big reason I’ve been wanting to switch to Github for the repo is because, several years ago, the Goldmine was made.

If we could make something akin to the Goldmine, where you can see image previews or gifs on the top level folders, then that would make finding specific animations much easier.

Alternatively, when @shin19 returns, we could convert this new Github repo to Emblem-Anims. Then we’ll have a fast-n-quick tool for downloading files, and a more fully-featured website for active previews.

…

Either way, I think this Github is the way forward. This is an experimental topic. Please give feedback on any ways you guys think we could improve the git, either via new organization, or just ways we can make it easier to use in general.

Oh, and one last thing: I found that if an animation folder only has one folder inside it, it jumps down to that folder, speeding up your folder-diving processes. You can also see which top-level animation folders only have one weapon type inside by their color.


Folders with white names: If you click them, they’ll have multiple weapon types, like so:

But for folders with grey names, if you click them you’ll go directly into their singular weapon type.

972×644

Give feedback please!

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One problem I have identified, and it’s not insignificant: Downloading individual files and folders. If you want to download the whole Repo, that’s easy. If you want to download just one animation or set of animations, it’s a little harder.

To download one thing, use Downgit.

Just navigate to the git folder you want, copy the link, and paste it in Downgit, like so:

Hit Download, wait for this to finish…

Just ensure you’re not trying to download HUGE folders. If a folder has more than 1000 files in it, you might have issues. Most animations, even the big ones, cap out below 800 files. Trying to download the entire Infantry or Fliers folder, for instance, would not work. If you’re going to do that, might as well download the whole Repo, like so:

Related:

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At first thinking about this, I was thinking that sticking with Google Drive would be better. Github is designed for code repositories, ainnit? Now that I consider using Github Desktop with this, I think this could be a much better alternative to Google. Downloading individual files is not really what Github is designed for - same for image previews. It is however designed for version control and mass file management.

Rather than download the entire repo straight from the site each time you want to check for animations, I’d rather clone the entire repository onto my machine, keep it there, and let Github Desktop check for updates. No need for juggling downloads manually, and file previews are handled by your own device. The only downsides I see to this are

  • The user would need a Github account to cleanly clone the repository, though the accounts are free to make. This just slightly lowers accessibility, though the option to directly download the repo would still be available. (That being said there’s the problem with being loosely familiarish with Github to accomplish this. I don’t think this is difficult to do, but I’ve worked with Github before so :man_shrugging:)
  • Cloning and keeping the repository on your machine would take up considerable disk space that not everyone would want to sacrifice.

Still I think the beenfits outweigh the downsides. I’d be in support of this shift.

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Yep. Each time there are updates, you slap the ‘pull origin’ button, and boom, you’re done. That’s it, no fuss no muss.

Downloading the whole repo will actually be the easiest part. I can write tutorials to teach people how to use it. Downloading individual folders/files is a bit trickier, but should be doable. I just tried using DownGit and GitZip, both of them seemed to work well, with GitZip having a little bit of setup to get running but actually executing much faster once complete.

I see this conversion as an eventual win. I do want to talk to Shin eventually about converting Emblem Anims to using the Git repo, though.

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I wish you all the best in your endeavour to port the hundreds of thousands files over. I think you’ll see it through to the end nonetheless even if it is a mountain of a task.

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Huh? I already did! The battle animation repo, the new version, is up. Link at the top of the OP.

I’m just trying to see now if there are any big improvements I can make or other things I need to take into consideration. Porting the rest of the repo, like tilesets, portraits, etc… that’s all fairly trivial in comparison. I’m also not sure if I should keep the battle animations separate from the rest of the repo since they have different considerations. A unified repo is probably better, but… eh!

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Unified is better imo.

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I mostly agree. However, the Portrait Repo is a little special. It relies entirely on images. Having image previews is a big deal. Since those aren’t a thing with Github, I don’t know if integrating them is for the best…

Stuff like tilesets, maps, etc though… yeah that can go in the new repo. I’ll probably just switch everything over, then worry about the nitty-gritty details later.

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Looks OK.
But the no images part is a real problem. It’s fine when it comes to animations since you know what you’re looking for but the main issue is the portraits and othr graphical assets.

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Took me a whole 15 mins to integrate all the rest of the Repo. Ez.

But… yeah. Need some sort of GUI to see images. Hmm…

Edit: And I just found this. Another useful link for the repo…

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The issue is the GitHub was made to share code and thus not showing graphics was not an issue.

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Sure, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a workaround for this sort of thing. I’m sure there has to be one.

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After a quick google search I learned this:

image
image827×1316 505 KB

  • Create a .MD file with the contents of each image to preview in markdown, I guess?

![Alt text](maps/0A000B0C.png?raw=True "Title")

You can do this as the relative path like above or as a fixed address link (not recommended).

Source: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14494747/how-to-add-images-to-readme-md-on-github

So you’d make this file as a preview of each subfolder, and then users would browse the .MD files.
I don’t know how you will create all these .MD files, though. You could maybe write a script to get the relative filename of each file in a folder, add the markdown code around it, and spit it out as a .MD file. It will still be a large undertaking, I think.

Good luck!

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Oh, gods. That’s a lot of work! At least it’s something, though. I’ll keep it in mind!

I ended up posting a question on Stackexchange. Maybe I’ll hit gold there.

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I’m pretty sure this works for .gifs, too, for the animation side of things. I’m admittedly not great with batch scripting, but someone who is could probably make one pretty easily to search recursively for .gif files and spit them out into a .MD as image tags.

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Some sort of folder drag-n-dropper .exe would be amazing. Yeti made one for the battle animation repo. I just drag the Infantry folder onto it, it crops away any duplicate FEB images and retimes gifs to gbafe speeds. Very handy.

Something similar for md files would pretty much solve our issues.

Well, there would be one issue. The images would all be at the bottom of folders, so… bit awkward navigating to them. Gotta scroll all the way down, and then you’ll just see a WALL of images.

Edit:

Ultimately, I would prefer we have some sort of browser extension that turns images into a grid viewing mode. The problem is, we’d need an extension for at least FF and Chrome. I really feel as though this -has- to exist somewhere, I’m just not finding it on Google or StackExchange’s search functions. Really frustrating. What are the odds in 10 years NOBODY has thought of making such a thing? Slim at best.

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I don’t know batch but I made a simple script that I’m sure someone can improve upon or completely rewrite.

Given these files:
image

It outputs preview.md with formatting as if every file in the folder were an image.

![names](names.bat?raw=True "names")
![Preview](Preview.md?raw=True "Preview")
![SplitPList](SplitPList.event?raw=True "SplitPList")
![test image preview](test image preview.md?raw=True "test image preview")

Save this code as a .bat file and run it:

rem Saved as Preview.md
@echo off
echo. >Preview.md

for %%F in (.\*) do @echo ![%%~nF](%%~nxF?raw=True "%%~nF")>>Preview.md

type Preview.md
pause

It does not check subdirectories or filter for only images or anything fancy. Again, I don’t know batch lol.

Ideally it’d be better to also format these previews in a table. Something like this:

|**Stuff**||||
| ------------- |:-------------:| -----:| -----:|
|![Alt text](maps/0A000B0C.png?raw=True "Title")|![Alt text](maps/0C000D0F.png?raw=True "Title")|![Alt text](maps/1D001E1F.png?raw=True "Title")|![Alt text](maps/2C002D2E.png?raw=True "Title")|
|![Alt text](maps/2C002D2E.png?raw=True "Title")|![Alt text](maps/2F003031.png?raw=True "Title")|![Alt text](maps/3B003D3F.png?raw=True "Title")|![Alt text](maps/2C002D2E.png?raw=True "Title")|
|![Alt text](maps/4B004D4E.png?raw=True "Title")|![Alt text](maps/4F005253.png?raw=True "Title")|![Alt text](maps/17001A1B.png?raw=True "Title")|![Alt text](maps/2C002D2E.png?raw=True "Title")|

Which looks like this:

image
image2034×1387 1.42 MB

After every 4th iteration, the script would need to add a | followed by a newline. Maybe someone else can chime in on that.

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Having to go through a couple hoops to download from GitHub has always been my problem with it. The GitZip thing might work, but you need an account because it hits the rate limit easily. And, creating an account may be free, but you can get auto-banned for doing the slightest suspicious thing as a new user, then you have to wait for customer support to un-flag your account. It’s not terribly slow, but it isn’t completely noob-friendly.

I mean, it’s still worth switching over, but it’s also important to anticipate the extra troubleshooting that’ll be required. And, getting Emblem Anims redirected to Github could help, but would that also be subject to rate limits?

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I’ve started looking into Gitlab, now. My biggest inspiration came from Rainlash and his project, Lex Talionis.

Gitlab overall seems better, just as a whole system. One thing I really like about Gitlab is this option:


Right out of the box, you can download any folder as a .zip. This is extremely useful for the repo, since anyone will be able to download an animation folder, including all its files and its subfolders, without needing an external program.

That’s huge. Every extra thing I have to ask people to install, tweak, or add will create friction for the end-user. I’d like to eliminate all of that as much as possible.

Gitlab is also fully compatible with Github Desktop, which I use. I know it’s compatible because I’m making an LT project with it.

My only concerns revolve around Github vs Gitlab’s bandwidth restrictions. I’m not sure what they are.

Gitlab has the same issue of not displaying images in a tiled view, but that’s fairly minimal as far as problems go. It doesn’t bother me any more than that same con for Github.

I’ll keep looking into this stuff. More info later…

Edit: As per this article…

To celebrate today’s good news we’ve permanently raised our storage limit per repository on GitLab.com from 5GB to 10GB. As before, public and private repositories on GitLab.com are unlimited, don’t have a transfer limit and they include unlimited collaborators.

I think this means… unlimited downloads? No bandwidth limit?

There’s also this:

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