- you could do it with a layer render script if you have the player walking on a higher layer than the ground (layer render scripts are like normal render scripts but attached to specific layers of the map)
- you could re-draw the player in the render script (currently the map + entities are drawn then the render script is called) so when you have a render script running you could have it draw the player as well so he's on top. (basically whatever is drawn last appears on top)
That's kinda interesting; gifs are a lot more bloated compared to modern videos compressed with a modern codec. I wonder if it's because there's not much movement in your videos. In any case, it does allow for a better general experience.
By the way, how do you create your gifs? Use any special tools?
Also, it's definitely worth mentioning that I like how much progress you're making with this!
As an example: The whirlpool video I posted is 29mb, where as my Arrrrrrgh.gif is only 288kb. The gif animation has a much smaller file size.
This is because you used Microsoft Video-1 encoding, which is an ancient codec format with very inefficient compression. The fact that it compresses that much more when zipped is very evident of that. A well-compressed video wouldn't become smaller inside a 7z at all.