Presenting Anima - a new tool for BfW artists

[AI]

No, the issue here is that he doesn't have (the right version of) libexpat installed.

[BroodKiller]

Soo...important new priorities are auto-detecting the wesnoth paths and emulating the attack defense behaviour. I will see if I will proceed quick enough, or if I'll stick to the "release early, release often" philosophy, and do some small updates. I will try to get the alpha working too, hopefully:) Other stuff gets pushed to the next release.

As for the problem that MrSeb was having, I'll see about building a universal MacOS executable to cater for v10.4 as well, if I'm lucky. In the meantime, you can try and build the tool yourself, it's quite easy, to be frank.

[rhyging5]

great BroodKiller!

but it could add some changes for artists with skills technics bad like me? For example, I think the program only open cfg. files. But an artist works with most animated gif and png files. For me it would be great if you could open one of these two types and the program will do the conversion to cfg. automatically. But really, I'm not sure if i'm demanding too much. I do not have this kind of knowledge..... but great!

[thespaceinvader]

It is, unfortunately - in order ot test an animation as it will appear in the game, you need to code it - however, this is not that difficult.

[BroodKiller]

The program must work with .cfg files, because it is the way Wesnoth handles animations. I may add some support for the image formats for drag'n'drop or automatic code generation, but it is a late priority for the moment, really. Currently, any Wesnoth animator simply must know WML, so it's only natural that Anima works this way. Providing with complete WML-less animation environment is something set in a very far future, I am afraid, rhyging5.
On the other hand, as thespaceinvader says, it's actually very easy to learn it.

[rhyging5]

I may be wrong, but why I should learn WML if I had a tool that saves me that step in addition of other advantages, being really useful? I'm sorry if I seem tedius...

[Boucman]

rhyging5 : it is tedious, but it's the best we have to offer at this point...

maybe a simple template could help, a WML snippet where you just have to add the image names...

BroodKiller how hard would this be to do ?

[thespaceinvader]

rhyging5: there is not an automated tool available. Computers only do what you tell them to do, and they cannot do things which are creative. Coding an animation is creative endeavour - you need to specify timings, offsets, sounds, projectiles, things like that. A tool could potentially do these things for you, but you'd still have to work out what you wanted them to be, and input the data yourself into the tool - so why no just input it directly into the cfg and save someone the trouble of writing a tool to do something that you could easily do yourself?

If you don't want to learn WML (you should try it, it's easy, albeit a little tedious ) I'll happily test your stuff out for you. But it would be way better if you could learn to test it yourself

[melinath]

Half of this tool is seeing the animation, but half of this tool is also generating .cfg so that you don't have to deal with animation WML, I thought... It should be simple enough to just include a sample .cfg file in the folder that can be used for tests, especially since (though I could be wrong here) not much is read from the file other than the animation itself.

[BroodKiller]

maybe a simple template could help, a WML snippet where you just have to add the image names...
BroodKiller how hard would this be to do ?

Half of this tool is seeing the animation, but half of this tool is also generating .cfg so that you don't have to deal with animation WML, I thought... It should be simple enough to just include a sample .cfg file in the folder that can be used for tests, especially since (though I could be wrong here) not much is read from the file other than the animation itself.

I don't really get what do you mean - a simple WML file with nothing but animation data can already be created with the "Save" option. However, to add animations and frames you don't need to open a .cfg file at all, you can do it right away. You will have to type all the paths by hand, which may be tedious, but that's all, really.

Once I get to the point of autoloading wesnoth paths, I just might create and internal database of available units, like melinath proposed, and then include some templates there, should need be.

Also, a full-fledged animation editor that does not require the artist to know WML is the final target, but what I meant was that since Anima does not support all WML features (as of yet), it cannot be used as a replacement.

[Boucman]

ok, after some quick testing, Anima can't create a unit "from scratch", but it can easily edit the animations of an existing unit... as such it's already a very usefull tool.

basically, you should add your new images to the unit's image directory, load the unit in anima, and from there you can add an animation.

[BroodKiller]

Boucman>Could you elaborate a bit? I think there might be some misunderstanding here about what does it mean to create a unit from scratch. The way I see it, and I have just positively tested it (win32 version) - you launch the program, choose the image root, choose an animation from the list, click "Add animation", then just add as many frames as you want and do whatever you want with them. Finally, you just save it all out. Sure, it outputs only raw animation data, not the other aspects of the unit, so it doesn't fully create the unit, but within the animation scope it works well.
Just to make it clear - I don't intend to argue, I am just confused about a purportedly missing feature that I was 100% positive to be there.

[StandYourGround]

I think by "creating a unit from scratch", he means drawing the unit there in the app, then animating it.

[tsr]

Well, I think creating a unit-skeleton.cfg to insert the animation-block into that Anima is capable of is both an easy and extremely helpful thing to do.

If you give the unit created with this template a known 'id' - like 'Anima_1' and then you also add an 'era' that has that unit as a leader and in it's recruitlist. Then the artist just creates the animation with Anima, 'saves' the skeleton in the Anima_Era directory, F5:s wesnoth and starts a new game to check out the animation in game.

I know it is not "just to do it" (I haven't checked out the code, and I'm fairly bad at python) but just giving a general idea of how you could do. (Ofc you are free to include other units in the Anima_Era too, and that might even be a good thing (tm) since then the artist can easily compare her/is animation with top-notch mainline ones.)

/tsr

[Boucman]

Brookiller : I have all sorts of ergonomical remarks, ping me on IRC someday...

about the "from scratch" issue, what I think and understand is not really relevant, let's get back to rhyging5's original remark, which boils down to

"I don't know WML or the wesnoth directory structure, it seems I can't use anima properly"

that's more or less true... Anima needs the wesnoth directory in two places

* the root directory has "/units" appended to it
* you can't create a unit from scratch, you have to use the "open" to start from an existing unit.

if you imagine your main user as an artist (i.e not a WML writer) which wants to test his animations in order to create animated gifs/give timing to a WML writer, your main user don't care about the nature of the animation, or the place in the tree where images will be stored. he's more interested in leaving Anima running in the background and looking at how his animation evolves each time he save his frames under gimp (i.e reloading the files continuously)

I think that was rhyging5's main point.


Edit : talk to the right person