Naive questions but . . . can I use a GIF in a HUD mod?

[DaveK]

I'm gently improving my basic HUD modding skills - well I think so anyway

It would be cool to have some of the extra eye candy displays I'm adding animated. Is it possible (at the moment or even in principle) to use GIFs to animate HUD and cockpit readouts? How are the 'items for sale' graphics handled in the trade console?

A second question . . .

Many 'bits' in a HUD mod are better as PNG's. Why then does 'affichage' only work as a JPEG? It would be less confusing if everything worked as the same filetype, especially for us Mod-Newbies

[Capt_Caveman]

I just tried a few gif's and they did'nt work.

[PaulB]

I just tried a few gif's and they did'nt work.

That's too bad - animated gifs were always good for control panels and such in Active Worlds - it never crossed my mind in EM.
But AW also supported another animation techinque.
If you made a "film Strip" which would be a BMP file in a format like 128x64 or 256x128 where they were stacked frames and eace 64x64 or 128x128 frame was a different version of the 1st frame in the stack then the AW engine wold treat it as a animation and display each frame. same technique as a roll of Video film and the engine gave if a defined length of time for the display of each frame.
Probably not a good idea in EM as it would be a feature that would eat more CPU tasking resources. But it would give some nice visual effects.

I suspect that the Station Landing Guide lights and such in EM are using a similar technique of some kind.

[DaveK]

I tried as well, but I was hoping someone (you there Vice? . . . . or on a well deserved holiday? ) might know of a way to do it

Sigh . . . I'll add it to the thinks you'd like to see in future then!

[Vice]

There currently isn't a way to import animated frames into the game. GIF's wouldn't work anyway, I would need to apply a technique like Paul described. Might be something I can look into in the future, but it would be a significant memory and possibly performance hog depending on how far you went with resolution and number of sequences.

[DaveK]

Probably not worth it just to have a few animated displays in the HUD, given that they wouldn't actually be giving any real info. There are more important things to spend resources on! Thanks for the explanation though!

[Marvin]

Blinking lights (2 frames ... on and off) would be cool. Especially if they were also incorporated in the default game ... wing tip lights on the ships.

[PaulB]

Blinking lights (2 frames ... on and off) would be cool. Especially if they were also incorporated in the default game ... wing tip lights on the ships.

It's not as simple as that.
All lights would not blink at the same rate or be on/off for the same duration - necessicating N number of frames to get the desired effect.
As Vice said it could be quite a performance hit.
In AW we tried to keep them done around 2 - 8 frames and 128xN or 256xN (or maybe even 64xN).
But while I would like the looks - I would rather not have them at the expense of performance - I simply can't afford an Intel i5 or i7 or whatever the new super cpus are. I expect there a a lot of people in the same situation. Some people can Upgrade computer every year (like Bill Gates woujld prefer) but some of us have to live with what we've got.
My last Full Tower had to last me 12 years - now that's what you call obsolete.

[Edited on 8-9-2014 by PaulB]

[DaveK]

Three strobing lights - red/green for port/starboard and white tail light - I'd settle for all flashing together and the same rate for all ships if that kept the resource hit down

[Vice]

Strobing lights aren't much of a performance hit as they can be rendered by scaling the 3D surface they are rendered on without any animated frames. There still is an additional load for the memory required to store the textures and create the additional 3D surfaces, but it's not as extensive as when applying multiple frames of animation to that surface.

[DaveK]

In which case I think that strobing lights would be a good visual addition. It'll be interesting to see if Marvin and i are lone voices in the void!

[Marvin]

Before Legends, I played another space game where the ships and the jumpgates had strobing lights ... I think they were great for adding immersion to the game.