Arvoch Alliance SE GIF animation...

[Marvin]

If the GIF is made up of exactly ten slides, will that sync with game cycle and, if so, what is the duration of a cycle? For example, say you want to animate a radar sweep (rotating arm)* or a sonar ping (expanding circles), how quickly will it take for the full animation?

* Probably not a good idea since any target within range of the radar will always show up anyway.

[Vice]

Yes and the rate/duration will be what is specified in the GIF image file itself.

[Marvin]

Okay.Thanks. Btw, GIMP has a fairly good GIF capability and, last time I downloaded, it was free.

[Vice]

Indeed, most should work. One user ran into an issue with a GIF file getting altered/corrupted in some way that resulted in the red 'X' with a checkerboard appearing where the image should be, but just resaving the file in a compatible format allowed it to work. With the range of animation stages and variable rates, this option opens the door for a wide variety of moving/animated indicators and displays on the HUD and cockpit.

[Marvin]

Yeah. Lots of blinking lights and whatever else somebody can come up with.

[TraderDan]

After some testing I think the cause was file size, I added a fade effect but didn't realize that brought gif from the size of a few hundred kilobytes to a couple megabytes - the tool I was using had an optimize feature which would trim excess frames and change the lossiness of the gif images once the gif was cut down to around 1mb or less it started working.