Presenting Anima - a new tool for BfW artists

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BroodKiller
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Presenting Anima - a new tool for BfW artists

Post by BroodKiller »

Hello there fellow Wesnothians, especially those with artistic skills and ambitions!
I have been a huge fan of Battle for Wesnoth for some time already. I think it is a wonderful game with a cool fantasy theme, great playability value and some beautiful art. Since I like it so much, I have decided to support the Wesnoth cause, and help out the community by making a (hopefully) useful application that I would like to announce now: Wesnoth Anima.

As its name may suggest, this little tool is an animation editor for Wesnoth. As such it is destined to work with the CFG files that contain the animation data - animation sets, frame length, frame images etc. It has been under silent development for some time now, and finally it is already stable and functional enough to be worthy a public release, to my mind. So, without further ado...

That's how it looks on Windows:
Image

...and on MacOS:
Image

Things Anima can do right now:
-Open the unit config files with animation data
-Preview the animations at various speeds, also in a loop
-Preview the animations with different team coloring and over different backgrounds
-Edit the length of a frame and the image used
-Jump directly to the selected animation
-Add/Remove frames to/from an animation
-Add/Remove entire animations
-Save out a (very) crude WML file with the animation data

Currently, the tool is in the beta stage, and it cannot handle the more complex config structures (see below), but this will hopefully change with time.

Things that are planned for a future release:
-Support for the alpha transparency
-Support for [if] statements
-Support for [offset] parameteres
-Exporting animations as animated gifs

I attach archives which contain the binaries for Win32 and MacOSX, as well as the program's source code for Linux platforms (it works fine there too). A quick apology to the Mac users: Anima does not have a proper application bundle as of yet, so it will launch a terminal window with it, I'm sorry for that.

Minor things to keep in mind: (just so you know)
-Animation preview playback uses a naive rendering loop, that will eat up your CPU resources. I know about this and I'm working on changing it to something more efficient.
-Changing a frame image filepath to something longer than the longest existing path will not (yet) automatically resize the column to fit the new content. This must be done manually at the moment.
-During animation playback, resizing of the program's window is blocked, to avoid drawing artifacts. When the animation stops, resizing is possible again.


I hope the artistic wing of BfW will find this a useful tool. As I am not an artist myself, further development of this tool is strongly dependent on the feedback that I will get from the community. I am open to bug reports, suggestions and comments, so don't hesitate and share what you think of it, or what features you would like to see in it :)

-BroodKiller
Attachments
wesnoth_anima-0.3-src.zip
(168.86 KiB) Downloaded 610 times
wesnoth_anima-0.3-mac.zip
(1.45 MiB) Downloaded 565 times
wesnoth_anima-0.3-win32.zip
(1.46 MiB) Downloaded 589 times
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jdsampayo
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Re: Presenting Anima - a new tool for BfW artists

Post by jdsampayo »

Good!

I tested it and it runs correctly on: Linux 2.6.31-14-generic #48-Ubuntu SMP x86_64 GNU/Linux
It will be useful to show in the preview the sprite that we double click. :mrgreen:
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artisticdude
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Re: Presenting Anima - a new tool for BfW artists

Post by artisticdude »

Runs fine on my mac mini with Snow Leopard (OS X version 10.6) installed. :) My only comment is why not have it running by itself without having to launch terminal? I know just about nothing about real programming, but it seems it should be able to launch without terminal having to activate. Of course, if that is just temporary while you figure out the bugs and stuff, just ignore this comment. :wink:
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BroodKiller
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Re: Presenting Anima - a new tool for BfW artists

Post by BroodKiller »

Thanks for the confirmation that it works on these platforms, guys :)

jdsampayo>Come again? I'm sorry but I didn't fully get your suggestion?

artisticdude>The terminal is shown because of the way how MacOS handles raw (non-bundled) binary applications, not the tool itself. I already made some progress here, and once I figure out how to complete it, it will no longer be a problem.
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melinath
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Re: Presenting Anima - a new tool for BfW artists

Post by melinath »

This looks awesome! Works in Ubuntu 9.10.

Feature request: Instead of choosing an image root, would it be possible to set the data and userdata directories, then load a _main.cfg? Essentially, to replicate the Wesnoth image path system. You would only have to access the image and unit files; the rest could be ignored. As a side benefit, you could probably then choose from a list of units instead of having to search through directories manually for a certain cfg.

Additionally, would it be possible to mimic the Wesnoth offset slider for attack animations?
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beetlenaut
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Re: Presenting Anima - a new tool for BfW artists

Post by beetlenaut »

Awesome! I've wished there was something like this for a long time. Thanks for writing it!

Bug report: The app runs, but I get this failed assertion twice as it loads:
"(Anima:8545): Gdk-CRITICAL **: gdk_drawable_get_size: assertion `GDK_IS_DRAWABLE (drawable)' failed"
I'm using openSUSE 11.2 with gtk2 2.18.1.

Feature request: It would be even more excellent if (eventually) you could do animations of fights with an enemy unit--your unit slides over and attacks, then gets attacked and defends. It would really help in adjusting the timings. (A choice of just a few types of enemy units would be fine.)
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Boucman
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Re: Presenting Anima - a new tool for BfW artists

Post by Boucman »

congratulation Broodkiller
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BroodKiller
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Re: Presenting Anima - a new tool for BfW artists

Post by BroodKiller »

beetlenaut wrote:Bug report: The app runs, but I get this failed assertion twice as it loads:
"(Anima:8545): Gdk-CRITICAL **: gdk_drawable_get_size: assertion `GDK_IS_DRAWABLE (drawable)' failed"
This is something that I am aware of, and it appears to be a wxGTK-specific issue. It has nothing to do with the program itself, and from what I could test, it didn't impair its proper working.
beetlenaut wrote:Feature request: It would be even more excellent if (eventually) you could do animations of fights with an enemy unit--your unit slides over and attacks, then gets attacked and defends. It would really help in adjusting the timings. (A choice of just a few types of enemy units would be fine.)
melinath wrote:Additionally, would it be possible to mimic the Wesnoth offset slider for attack animations?
I was thinking about this - it will require some work to get done properly, but it is perfectly doable.
melinath wrote:Feature request: Instead of choosing an image root, would it be possible to set the data and userdata directories, then load a _main.cfg? Essentially, to replicate the Wesnoth image path system. You would only have to access the image and unit files; the rest could be ignored. As a side benefit, you could probably then choose from a list of units instead of having to search through directories manually for a certain cfg.
Hmm...that's a very interesting idea. It would streamline some potential future developments, like the abovementioned attack animations, projectiles etc. I am thinking now about simply asking the user for the main wesnoth directory, and work off from there. Dunno where it goes on linux though, to be honest...
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melinath
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Re: Presenting Anima - a new tool for BfW artists

Post by melinath »

Perhaps a preferences menu to allow people to choose a root directory and an add-on directory?

On linux, the it-wesnoth packages install to /usr/share/games/wesnoth(-unstable) and use ~/.wesnoth(-unstable) as userdata.
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beetlenaut
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Re: Presenting Anima - a new tool for BfW artists

Post by beetlenaut »

The linux locations are distro specific. Mine are quite different. A preferences menu would work fine though--A linux user who compiles Anima can find their wesnoth data directory.
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AI
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Re: Presenting Anima - a new tool for BfW artists

Post by AI »

Or you could run the following command:

Code: Select all

wesnoth --config-path
Should work on every platform. (as long as wesnoth is installed)
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melinath
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Re: Presenting Anima - a new tool for BfW artists

Post by melinath »

config path only returns the userdata directory, though.
AI
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Re: Presenting Anima - a new tool for BfW artists

Post by AI »

There's something for that too:

Code: Select all

wesnoth --path
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MrSeb
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Re: Presenting Anima - a new tool for BfW artists

Post by MrSeb »

Hi!
I was eager to try your editor but I couldn't make it run on Mac OSX (v10.4.11) :(
The Terminal app outputs this kind of error message:

Code: Select all

dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/lib/libexpat.1.dylib
  Referenced from: /Users/myself/Desktop/Wesnoth New Art/wesnoth_anima-0/Anima
  Reason: image not found
Note that as an artist I'm not familiar at all with using Terminal… should Anima be placed in a particular folder or location to find Wesnoth's ressources?

Hope someone can advise me here… and thanks Broodkiller for caring about us pixel-tweakers!
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Re: Presenting Anima - a new tool for BfW artists

Post by Velensk »

I believe the problem is that one of your folder names has a space in it. When the terminal reads it the command ends at the first delimiter. Try renameing the folder and running the same command.
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