Maybe you wonder why, after two teasers on “the great walking pendat”, you still can’t see it animated ? Well, the thing is I still haven’t got any competent animation exporter so far. All the previous animations from AnimEDS were either hand-generated from static snapshots, or screencasts from either AnimEDS in desmume or from the game engine.
But that screencast tool (byzanz-record) shows its limits when one wants pixel art-level animation, and not merely a gameplay teaser: it’s introducing dirty pixels all over the place.
So I refreshed my brain with API of the Imlib2 library I used for spr2png a while ago and started a proper animation ripper for my own .spr file format. I plan to first build static frames in .png and let a post-processing step build an animation out of that. I bet swapping will be the most annoying feature to support.
Stay tuned …
hmm …
edit: Well, the tools have progressed, that’s sure. I still need to hack support for 32×32 blocks, though. On the other hand, it’s pretty screwed for the pendat: I used pencil tiles as a quick replacement for pencil sprites content, but that’s not a valid approach in the game engine, and that isn’t either for the extractanim.pl tool 😛
But with the “apply change to this frame and all the following” button, replacing the page and recovering graphics is a matter of 5 minutes with the DS in hands ^_^
Bouli's Homebrew Blog 