User blog:Makallus/Deco GIFs

Preamble
I really like the animated decorations but sometimes it's hard to tell what they are and how they look until its too late -- being most are premium cost. So this begins my journey to create and post animated versions of the decorations in the game.

Background
While the images in-game are all static PNGs the animations come in a couple flavors.

1) The dinos and villagers are animated using an image map. This is a larger PNG with several smaller images of each of the animation frames and an associated "plist" which clips out pieces of the image map and describes the animation sequence, here's an image map and animation frame from the plist for the protoceratops:



frames dino-Protoceratops-s4-front-0001.png frame {{326,94},{102,88}} offset {-10,-73} rotated sourceColorRect {{64,154},{102,88}} sourceSize {250,250}

2) The animated decorations however are a combination of a static PNG (usually posted here as the image asset of a decoration article) and a particle parameter list:

 angle 0.0 angleVariance 0.0 blendFuncDestination 771 blendFuncSource 1 duration -1 emitterType 0.0 finishColorAlpha 1 finishColorBlue 0.91471356153488159 finishColorGreen 0.60498046875 finishColorRed 0.59065753221511841 finishColorVarianceAlpha 0.0 finishColorVarianceBlue 0.0 finishColorVarianceGreen 0.0 finishColorVarianceRed 0.0 finishParticleSize 10.079999923706055 finishParticleSizeVariance 0.0 gravityx 0.0 gravityy -100.2845458984375 maxParticles 18 maxRadius 100 maxRadiusVariance 0.0 minRadius 0.0 particleLifespan 0.66369998455047607 particleLifespanVariance 0.10000000149011612 radialAccelVariance 0.0 radialAcceleration 0.0 rotatePerSecond 0.0 rotatePerSecondVariance 0.0 rotationEnd 0.0 rotationEndVariance 0.0 rotationStart 0.0 rotationStartVariance 0.0 sourcePositionVariancex -54.9765625 sourcePositionVariancey 15 sourcePositionx 160 sourcePositiony 240 speed 0.0 speedVariance 0.0 startColorAlpha 1 startColorBlue 1 startColorGreen 1 startColorRed 1 startColorVarianceAlpha 0.0 startColorVarianceBlue 0.0 startColorVarianceGreen 0.0 startColorVarianceRed 0.0 startParticleSize 22.680000305175781 startParticleSizeVariance 8 tangentialAccelVariance 0.0 tangentialAcceleration 0.0 textureFileName particle_crystaltree_texture_v3.png

The Process
In researching this parameter file I've found several standard Java libraries which are likely used in the TV game code. To this end there are a number of Windows based particle designer engines which should allow me to reproduce a particle effect to animated GIF fairly easily. I can write a custom transform from the game DTD into an particle designer engine save file and produce a GIF of the same or similar particle effect.

More to come later....