Animated GIF walkthroughs

edited February 2007 in Games
I've made an animated GIF of a 19 second walkthrough of Bugaboo the Flea. It weighs in at a not-bad 160K:

http://pearcy.googlepages.com/bugaboo2.gif

I'm gonna make some more, and see if I can improve the file size.
Post edited by Daren on

Comments

  • edited June 2006
    Thats pretty neat,i understand your concern regarding file size,my main interest on the retro scene is arcade coin-op and for a new section of my webpage i am working on i have made 400 arcade game clips and uploaded over 200 of them-because of the higher number of colours each ranges from 300KB to 3MB! with each clip lasting around 8 seconds.I had to buy new webspace just to space the idea LOL
  • edited June 2006
    Daz, SPIN can make these for you now - I'm just finishing the interface code off for them :-)

    D.
  • edited June 2006
    Very exciting, but I couldn't bring myself to watch the end, as Iv'e never completed the game, despite having been playing it since it was originally released! I'm gonna load it up again soon and follow your lead. One day I'll get that poor old flea out of there.

    Well done

    :)
  • edited June 2006
    Dunny wrote:
    Daz, SPIN can make these for you now - I'm just finishing the interface code off for them :-)

    D.

    Nice one Dunny! :-)
  • edited June 2006
    Graz wrote:
    Very exciting, but I couldn't bring myself to watch the end, as Iv'e never completed the game, despite having been playing it since it was originally released! I'm gonna load it up again soon and follow your lead. One day I'll get that poor old flea out of there.

    Well done

    :)

    ive completed it loads of times :)
    one of my fave speccy games, so simple and basic but addictive
    Professional Mel-the-Bell Simulator................"So realistic, I found myself reaching for the Kleenex King-Size!" - Richard Darling
  • edited June 2006
    Here's an animated GIF of a 6 minute walkthrough of Atic Atac:

    http://www.aoxl77.dsl.pipex.com/aticatac2.gif

    At 1.12MB the file size isn't that bad, considering.
  • edited June 2006
    much better than googlevideo!
    looking forward to see it working in Spin.... rzx gif studio, yummy :wink:
    G! - That makes sense in BASIC 0:1
  • edited July 2006
    Finally finished the AnimGIF support in SPIN. It doesn't do optimisations based on transparencies yet, but it does do all the other optimisations.

    Here's a 9.81mb(!) GIF of the first level of Cybernoid - SPIN recording a GIF whilst replaying an RZX :-)

    http://homepage.ntlworld.com/paul.dunn4/cyber2.gif

    It's a large file because it includes the whole border and runs at 25fps. Each image is about 1.5kb on average, which is quite a saving from the 101kb needed for the full display frame.

    Oh yes, Microsoft's GIF display routines are very, very broken so this will play back quite slowly in IE or the Windows Image Viewer. Firefox users will get the animation at full speed.

    D.
  • edited July 2006
    Now that is friggin' excellent.
  • edited July 2006
    And here's another:

    I thought that Sabre Wulf would be a good one to do, as it's distribution denied so not many people will see the RZX...

    At 15fps, it weighs in with 8000+ frames at 15fps. Not bad optimisation if I say so myself.

    http://homepage.ntlworld.com/paul.dunn4/SabreWulf.gif

    D.
  • edited July 2006
    Impressive
  • edited July 2006
    That's great that, Dunny. The file size is very good, for the number of frames in it.
  • edited February 2007
    How are you folks getting nicely cropped animated gifs? I have no problem creating animated gifs with Spin, but they are all 352x296 in size, with the speccy screen in the top left corner. I don't have the tools to crop the gifs manually (the ones I have only do one frame) and I've briefly experimented with some of the ini settings but no dice. So then what is the secret :-) ?
  • edited February 2007
    There's a small bug in the animgif creator in the last official version of ZXSpin. You should be able to create them by specifying not to include the border in the options, but you will get a blank frame at the start...

    D.
  • edited February 2007
    If you can get your paws on it, Adobe ImageReady is the business for all things GIF. And the folks over at B3TA may be able to lend advice, they do love their speccies.
  • edited February 2007
    ive completed it loads of times :)
    one of my fave speccy games, so simple and basic but addictive

    PS: I completed Bugaboo a few months after making that post. At last, that cute lil flea is safe. The walkthrough really inspired me to do it. Thankyou!
  • edited February 2007
    How do you guys get the sizes so small? I did Pyjamarama in Spin and it came out 10mb.
  • edited February 2007
    CUCHULAINN wrote: »
    How do you guys get the sizes so small? I did Pyjamarama in Spin and it came out 10mb.

    Try setting it to 10 fps.
  • edited February 2007
    Try setting it to 10 fps.

    OK, will do, thanks.
  • edited February 2007
    CUCHULAINN wrote: »
    OK, will do, thanks.

    That's pretty good advice - if anyone wants to view your walkthrough in Internet Explorer, then you'd not get any faster playback than that.

    As for filesize, that's dependant on the amount of movement on the screen. Each frame is stored as the differences between the last and the current - so small differences will compress better in the main.

    D.
  • edited February 2007
    tried to record the gif and wav simultaneously (Savage part I) and to combine them in video editing program to get a nice movie... but after few frames (approx. after 1.5 or 2secs) it makes strange effect: the gif turns upside down and freezes at certain frame, which remains the same till the end
    (althougt the original gif works ok, after putting it into v. editing pgm it behaves like this)

    don´t you know what´s the cause?
    perhaps it´s in decoding the frame2frame changes which may be uncompatible with the video editing processes...(with AVI and other formats)
    G! - That makes sense in BASIC 0:1
  • edited February 2007
    tried to record the gif and wav simultaneously (Savage part I) and to combine them in video editing program to get a nice movie... but after few frames (approx. after 1.5 or 2secs) it makes strange effect: the gif turns upside down and freezes at certain frame, which remains the same till the end
    (althougt the original gif works ok, after putting it into v. editing pgm it behaves like this)

    I'd say that given that the original .gif file displays fine in other programs, then there's an issue with your video recording application.

    Try another, and see what happens.

    D.
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