Skip to main content
↑
↓
Spherical forums
Community for the
Sphere game engine
New?
Contact Us
to register an account!
1 Hour
1 Day
1 Week
1 Month
Forever
Community
Help
Search
Recent Posts
Log in
Contact Us
News
Spherical
Facebook
-
Twitter
-
Discord chat
New?
Contact us
to register an account!
Sphere Development
Sphere General
About Sphere Animation Files...
1
Print
Topic: About Sphere Animation Files...
(Read 5322 times)
previous topic
-
next topic
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
Datomas
Logged
Guest
About Sphere Animation Files...
May 23, 2016, 12:43:45 am
I can't find any info about them on the wiki (other than functions used to read from them) and none of the editors I've used actually allow them to be created. I don't even know the file extension for them. Is there any info at all on these things and how to go about creating them?
Fat Cerberus
Big Chungus
Posts: 2,774
*MUNCH*
Logged
Global Moderator
Sphere Developer
Re: About Sphere Animation Files...
Reply #1
–
May 23, 2016, 02:00:10 am
The standard Sphere animation format is MNG. It's a variant of PNG that supports animation. Both legacy Sphere and minisphere support it. Sphere 1.x also supports .FLIC (or something?) but I don't think there's any software still in existence that can still write that format.
It might be difficult to find software that can write MNG files too, it's basically a dead format at this point. Once the patents expired on GIF, MNG just kind of died off.
neoSphere 5.9.2
-
neoSphere
engine -
Cell
compiler -
SSj
debugger
forum thread
|
on GitHub
Flying Jester
Legendary Poster
Posts: 1,161
Logged
TurboSphere Developer
Re: About Sphere Animation Files...
Reply #2
–
May 23, 2016, 02:33:06 am
I think the easiest way to make an mng would be to make a gif or apng, and then use ffmpeg to convert to mng.
And to be fair, back when Sphere was young, mng was a serious contender to gif. It's still superior in many ways, but now apng has surpassed it...for some reason.
Learn some history?
The Flying Jester's Blog of Sorts
Datomas
Logged
Guest
Re: About Sphere Animation Files...
Reply #3
–
May 23, 2016, 02:23:01 pm
Huh, that's interesting. Never knew about that format... Might even be worth trying to make some just to see how it works. Might actually use them in my project for the hell of it. Thanks for the info, guys.
UPDATE:
Well, obviously, it turns out you all were right, could barely find anything that even knows what the format is. GIMP, I found out, is able to export files as .mng (but can't open them?!) So yeah. Dead format.
The file I exported from was read by Sphere (1.5) and the functions seemed to work, except for getNumFrames(), it always returned 0. Well, either way, it was an interesting little history time travel thing. Obviously not a format worth the effort making anything with.
Last Edit
: May 24, 2016, 12:27:46 am by Datomas
N E O
Hero Poster
Posts: 585
Making it happen!
Logged
Administrator
Senior Administrator
Re: About Sphere Animation Files...
Reply #4
–
June 02, 2016, 02:10:07 pm
Yea, I did tests with MNG in Sphere around 2004 or 2005 or so and found it much easier to simply create a spriteset and animate it in code or using map engine command queuing.
Fat Cerberus
Big Chungus
Posts: 2,774
*MUNCH*
Logged
Global Moderator
Sphere Developer
Re: About Sphere Animation Files...
Reply #5
–
June 02, 2016, 03:09:37 pm
Most likely I will drop support for .mng in minisphere 4.0 and lose the dependency on libmng. It's kind of just a curiosity at this point. I think the only major Sphere game that actually uses the Animation API is Kefka's Revenge and that game has other issues preventing it from fully working in minisphere, so given the lack of software support for .mng its probably best just to drop it.
As NEO says, you can always get the same effect with an animated spriteset.
By the way, @Datomas, I fully recommend upgrading to minisphere. Sphere 1.x is no longer maintained and minisphere has a ton of new features (and is much faster!).
neoSphere 5.9.2
-
neoSphere
engine -
Cell
compiler -
SSj
debugger
forum thread
|
on GitHub
Datomas
Logged
Guest
Re: About Sphere Animation Files...
Reply #6
–
June 06, 2016, 01:15:48 pm
Yeah, I'm looking at minisphere now at the moment, but it introduces a lot of concepts I can't seem to wrap my head around just yet. Like CommonJS modules, don't fully get how they work... I've got a lot of brushing up to do, but I did look at the Sphere 2.0 API and I'm pretty psyched about the features.
1
Print
Sphere Development
Sphere General
About Sphere Animation Files...