I have found a need for a current game of mine to use flash style animation, namely to save heavily on file space thanks to this being a casual game.

So I am about a week into development and I'm doing pretty good. The only problem is I have never used Flash for any reason, so I do not know what the tools are in Flash, so I'm here asking what anyone here would want in their flash animator for 3dgs.

What I have so far.

256 frames

Load in pre-made images. They become their panel and in each frame can be adjusted in every way for each additional frame, with the exception of the center x and y which provide the angle. Up to 32 panels can be used.

Frame copying and "in between frame" making to help make animations faster.

IS there anything else that should be added? Would this be a tool the community would be interested in?

Well the space savings in flash arent so much because of the keyframe management, its because it uses vector drawing. A list of shapes to draw and fill in instead of storing each pixel individually.

That's what this does. Load one image of an arm. Move and angle that arm through the animations yet file space never gets bigger than the image size of that arm plus the 8kb the Master file takes up. I cut down from a meg per image sheet to less than 100kbites and that is for an insanely complicated image.

I stand corrected. Much props for one week of work. are you planning any vector drawing features (actual lines and fills) or are you only going to use the cut up images?

also it seems to me it might be interesting to convert this to 3d as well, having an animation timeline would be handy at times i'd guess.

If I could see a use for it then I could do the vector drawing for lines and such, however you would have more control making the image you want in any editor and loading it up and altering it needed.

A 3d version of this would probably not help in file size. That file size is usually more dependent on the size of the texture than the animations. Might be easier to animate but would leave gaps.

Jus difg this topic

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video trailer

yeah, i only say 3d capability not to take so much advantage of the file savings as much as to make use of the timeline fucntionality

Interesting Ratchet. I also use Unity but since it has a hatred of doing anything in 2d other than just displaying an image I stopped. I actually made a custom animation system with it as well that put in different images at certain times. A pain I can tell you. If I could rotate images I would have used unity for this game thanks to it's ability to be used in web pages + I-whatever. I know there is an add on to be able to do this but I don't want to have to buy something extra.