Hi! Me and 4 classmates are doing a game as a project for school. Our biggest problem is: how do we organize our sprite animation images? We know that we should use ONE .bmp with the animations on it. But... How do YOU organize it? What''s the standard size of an "animation map" (don''t know if it''s the right word but...)? It would be very cool if anyone could posts some links thanx... "No lies of sugar can sweeten the sournes of reality" }+TITANIUM+{ A.K.A. DXnewbie[onMIRC]

quote: Original post by Seriema
We know that we should use ONE .bmp with the animations on it.

Should? You could, but you definately don''t have to. Some prefer to preprocess their images into custom sprite formats. Others simply use "extended" bitmap formats, identical to .BMP but with auxilliary data about where the sprites are, what size they are and in what order they should be assembled.

Use whatever works best for you and is within your reach.

I haven''t used sprites (or written a game) in three years. My last sprite game used uniformly sized sprites in a rectangular grid. The sprite height and width were determined from the image data itself, and pixel (0,0) was interpreted as the border color. Pixel (1,1) was the assumed transparency color, unless switched off or overridden (command line options for preprocessing tools, parameters for in-game).

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Thanks to Kylotan for the idea!

ehm... yes. But we''ve already decided to use a "sprite animation map" or whatever it''s called. I''d like to hear some suggestions on HOW the images should be placed on the big image. There are alot of free sprite libraries on the net. But I''d like to see how you guys handled it. Since those free are for small sprites with phew animations. Ours will have standard walk, attack, defend, die, hurt, victory, etc. And we''d like to keep the characters "not too small", kinda the size in Baldurs Gate so you can see some detail

"No lies of sugar can sweeten the sournes of reality"

}+TITANIUM+{ A.K.A. DXnewbie[onMIRC]

Well, assuming that you are putting ALL character animations in one bitmap, you could do this:
Create a bitmap and create an invisible grid for the different parts of your animation sequence. Organize this into any grid you'd like (10*10, 5*2, etc), using equally sized "tiles". Then, when you load the graphis into your application, have a function that accepts the starting x and y position, numer of rows, columns, and the height and width of each "tile". The function will then automatically extract the tiles into memory. This gives you lots of flexibility.
fred

[edited by - fredjordans on March 27, 2002 5:58:10 PM]

I don''t think that there''s any standard to conform to.