Is anyone willing to code a 'good looking' Spell Animation Gif-Maker for the Repo?

Requests
1

Hey all, Klok here.

I’ve been wanting to make big progress on the Spell Animation Repo for at least two years now. Unfortunately, the tools I have available don’t work well for making it nearly up to the standards of the rest of the Repository.

If I extract a gif for a spell using FEBuilder, it will end up looking like this:
https://i.imgur.com/SHlnIJ6.gif
https://i.imgur.com/Yo3KCtr.gif
https://i.imgur.com/PERFELd.gif
https://i.imgur.com/hLCEzvh.gif

How does this translate ingame? Does it look good? Does it look funky or weird? Etc.

What I would like is a tool that overlays the ‘battle layer’ of a typical GBA battle. I would like to have some generic enemy, such as a soldier, on the left, and a magic user, such as a mage, on the right. I would like to be able to insert the spell and spit out a GBA-sized gif of the mage casting his spell, the spell playing, and striking the enemy.

This would give the spell animation repo a good gif preview for each spell.

…

The second and far less desirable option is to record videos of each spell in the rom. This comes with its own benefits and problems, however. Take Mikey Seregon’s latest post, where he includes a video of the spell previewing.

This video gives us a full preview in the game of how the spell looks and what SFX it uses. Great, right? Except because the video includes all of the spells in one post, I’d have to put them all in the same folder, or use the same video link multiple times and leave people to guess which one represents the specific spell in the video.

Additionally, this would require the slow and tedious task of inserting spells, getting them working, setting up a battle, recording, editing, and putting that video in the repo. One by one. Dozens if not hundreds of times. It’s not sustainable and there’s no easy way to do it. A lot of spells actually do have videos, notably those submitted by SHYUTERz, but not all of them do.

So, yeah.

Maybe @7743 could include some sort of "Dump spell with a battle background’ option into FEBuilder? Maybe someone can whip up a workable prototype I could use to format all the spells to some hitherto nonexistent uniform standard?

I will take any suggestions or thoughts. Let’s work together on this; the current Spell Repo is absolutely gross and not fun to slog through, and we can do better to improve it.

Thanks!

2

If the febuilder one could export gifs with an alpha channel, or if it’s always the 0th colour index, you could just overlay it, I think.
Might fall under the term “watermark”.

3

It’s not just a matter of overlaying, it would ideally represent how the animation looks ingame. That means the timing of the attack, the positioning, etc.

4

Magic is a difficult area for many reasons.
For now, I will fixed the image size problem.
I will not fix other issues.

If you want a perfect preview, please play it on an emulator and record it.
Alternatively, please post a link to the preview video posted by the author.

The various reasons are as follows.

There are two types of magic engines, each with different resolutions and data storage methods.

There are two types of magic, BG and OBJ, each with different resolutions and data storage methods.

CSACreator has a compatibility mode that supports BGs made for FEditorADV.

FEBuilderGBA has a conversion function that allows magic with BGs made for CSACreator to be imported in FEditorADV.

FEBuilderGBA has a conversion function that allows magic with BGs created for FEditorADV to be played on CSACreator without changing the script.

The magic is equipped with options to change the transparency of the background and the luminosity.
This feature is not yet supported by the FEBuidlerGBA preview.
Therefore, it will not be reflected in the gifs either.

Magic is equipped with a function to activate it by darkening the battle screen.
This function is also not supported in the preview.
Therefore, it will not be reflected in the gifs either.

1-5 are the parts that are resolution related.
“How many modes are there in total?” This is a complex area.
However, this seems to be manageable, so I will fix it.

For 6-7, we do not support it.
The reason is that it is very difficult to reproduce perfectly.
If you really want to reflect this in a gif, please play the magic in an emulator and record it.

For the above reasons, we cannot fulfill requests for gifs that include the background of the battle screen.

Also, when recording magic scripts in the repository, it is recommended that you record the data submitted by the author as is “as much as possible”, rather than exporting it.
The reason for this is that, due to the characteristics of 4-5, the data will be automatically converted when imported into a magic system that does not originally support the animation.
Therefore, if you dump and save this, you may get data that is slightly different from what the author created.

For example, if you put a magic created with a high resolution BG for CSACreator into a ROM with a FEditorADV engine, the data will be reduced to FEditorADV resolution and saved.
When you dump it, the reduced data will be dumped.
It would be disappointing if an animation that had been made in high resolution would be reduced and posted.

Therefore, it is recommended to use the data submitted by the author as much as possible.

As long as you are importing with FEBuilderGBA, you can import magic animations developed for either magic engine, so don’t do anything unnecessary and change the data.

In most cases, when a magic animation is posted, the author will have posted a video for preview, so you can either post the video data as is, or post a link to the video.
Our goal is not to make gif animations, but to view previews, so I think that would accomplish our goal.

3 Likes
5

The gif I need is for previewing ‘essentially’ how the spell looks, for the sake of putting it on the Repo website. In the ideal world, this sort of gif would not be what you insert into the ROM. It would only be a visual approximation of how the spell might look in game.

I’m not asking for perfect quality, only some alternative to posting the basic spell gifs like I posted above. If I have to insert the spells one by one, test the ROM, record the spells in action, that will be hundreds of videos. Very tedious and hard to record. The current gifs for the Battle Animations are a good example of what I want for the spell animation repository.

https://i.imgur.com/MVg7fkf.png

These gifs don’t tell you exactly how a battle animation will look in a romhack, but they give a really good approximation. The spell gifs do not, and that is the problem I’m trying to solve.

6

I think it’s better than before because the resolution issue has been resolved.
However, I don’t want any more reproducibility, so if you really want it, make it yourself.

You can download the video and convert it to a gif animation with ffmpeg, or embed the youtube video in an iframe.
Or, if you click the link, you can jump to youtube.
If you want to put an image in the list, I think you can show the thumbnail of youtube.

2 Likes