Task: Unit window animations

[joulupunikki]

Collaborative task 3

Unit window animations

Motivation

Although the unit animations in the stack display/unit info window are technically not required for Phoenix to be fully playable, the animations contribute to the special feeling generated by EFS. Thus, to fully recreate the gaming experience, it would be good to be able to play the animations in Phoenix.

Implementation sketch

(7.10.2015: A method to read and display the first frame of FLC files, UtilG.flcDecodeFirst(), has been implemented, thus Phoenix now has static unit images in unit info window.)

The animations are FLC-format files, thus an flc-player would be required. A full blown Phoenix patch with an FLC-player is not necessary, a side project which implements a proof of concept player capable of playing EFS FLCs would be most excellent. Code for applet FLC players is available on the net.

Estimated work

• Difficulty: moderate/hard
• Size: small/medium

Examples

A GPLed applet flc player
http://vento.pi.tu-berlin.de/STROEMUNGSAKUSTIK/SOFTWARE/fliplay/main.html
An applet flc player (not sure of license)
https://vsr.informatik.tu-chemnitz.de/staff/jan/FLI/FlicFile.html

[MoeheinS]

Came here from issue #79
How vital is FLC support? It's been a while since I played with EOFS' FLCs but I'm pretty confident they can be converted to other formats without impacting the EOFS custom pallette. If need be one could even rip each seperate frame. I don't think I've seen any mod add in custom FLC animations, so is there any merit in converting ALL the FLCs to another format? PNG for static images and GIF or what have you for the animations?

[joulupunikki]

Hyperion has custom FLCs. Also, the conversion of EFS data to another format would necessitate distribution of EFS IP material (IANAL, but format conversion does not create new copyrightable art), which is always good to avoid if possible. And the FLC support coding is not necessarily too difficult, or time consuming, it's just one of the things which, if done at the expense of necessary feature implementation, will delay the game at best and be time wasted on vapour ware at worst.