#136843 - AaronBlood10 - Sun Aug 05, 2007 9:13 pm
Ok. I have an entirely new project in the works. I've always wanted an animation program for the DS because I love making animations, and I think it would be awesome to have one on the DS since it has a touch screen and would be great for it.
The program will be called Action Animation, simply because I couldn't think of a better name. I created a blog for the project here. You can check there periodically for updates.
Now, I don't have any releases to speak of, but the reason why I am announcing it now is because I wanted to let you all know about it and see if anyone wanted to help or had any suggestions on the structure of the program or anything. If you do, you can shoot me an email at blood.aaron@gmail.com
I'm planning on taking it in small steps. First, I'll release a simple drawing program to test, and later, I'll develop that into an animation program and then maybe add colors, etc.
Oh and one more thing, I, being the typical poor college student, have only one device to test things with, GBAMP. So, if you'd like to help test with other devices you can send me an email also.
Well thats all for now. I'll let you know when I have my first demo ready.
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Animation program for the DS in progress
actionanimation.blogspot.com
#136846 - spinal_cord - Sun Aug 05, 2007 9:45 pm
I don't mind testing, I have a GBAMP and Neo R6. Would this work similar to Mario Paint? or more like flash?
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#136850 - AaronBlood10 - Sun Aug 05, 2007 10:44 pm
Hmm..I'm not sure. I use flash all the time, but I've never played mario paint.
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Animation program for the DS in progress
actionanimation.blogspot.com
#136858 - Dood77 - Sun Aug 05, 2007 11:27 pm
A Flash-like animation program would be really cool, with vector graphics, and tweening and everything... but it would also be really hard. Mario paint is just basically drawing into simple frames, then animating.
Anyway I think this is a great idea, and would be willing to test on my Supercard: miniSD.
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If I use a term wrong or something then feel free to correct, I?m not much of a programmer.
Original DS Phat obtained on day of release + flashme v7
Supercard: miniSD, Kingston 1GB, Kingston 2GB
Ralink chipset PCI NIC
#136860 - AaronBlood10 - Sun Aug 05, 2007 11:33 pm
Ok...in that case it'd be more like mario paint. I don't think I could make vector-based graphics with tweening in my animation program.
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Animation program for the DS in progress
actionanimation.blogspot.com
#136904 - GoopyMonkey - Mon Aug 06, 2007 10:21 am
Sounds good! I'm looking forward to the first release. I use Flash all the time and have never even used some tools, so it doesn't need to be Flash DS. Of course, you could make it so, if you really wanted to... ;)
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#136906 - TheYak - Mon Aug 06, 2007 10:43 am
You might check out the old Flipbook app. It did a few cool things considering how old the homebrew is. Shame it couldn't save.
Vector-based imaging and tweening might not be doable, but it seems like onion-skinning would be doable.
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#136920 - AaronBlood10 - Mon Aug 06, 2007 3:05 pm
Yes, I was actually thinking about implementing onion-skinning later on.
_________________
Animation program for the DS in progress
actionanimation.blogspot.com
#136922 - laurens - Mon Aug 06, 2007 3:38 pm
I was kind of hoping to see an animation app like this one.
Just plain and simple and everyone can doodle something fun.
#136933 - Katamari - Mon Aug 06, 2007 5:13 pm
I really do wholeheartedly welcome such project. I'm an animator myself. Not to sure how I could help on this one but a couple of these things would be nice (I can't programme to save my life...)
1)Onion skinning
2)Multiple layers on each frame
3) Gif export or being able to export the frames individually in one type of format or another.
I don't know how useful I can be. I've just finished a game concept and now in the process of completing some artwork for it (as well as going to work blah blah), but if you need hand on anything just pm me
#136983 - x999x - Tue Aug 07, 2007 2:10 am
Hello, thank you for your interest in the NDS and animation, it's somewhat of a passion of mine :)
May I recommend, Pencil?
http://www.les-stooges.org/pascal/pencil/index.php?id=Home
It's opensource and very streamlined. In the least, it could be a good tool to use as a model for certain functions animators may use/require.
Thanks again :)
#137071 - alfatreze - Tue Aug 07, 2007 7:27 pm
Awesome idea, there is inchworm from flatblackfilms http://www.flatblackfilms.com/DS.html, but except from a movie I caught one of these days there isn't much info, take a peek it has a few nice ideas.
Don't fret too much about the drawing part, put something really basic up, ang go for the core, for drawing we have colors wich is great, stick to the point and improve later.
Decide wich technology to use, go 2D or 3D with the core of the program, check the advantages of one and the other, taking in mind possibility for layering and onion skinning wich would be great.
As for features, right from the bat it would be gret to have 2/3 layers, at least 2 would be great, background and drawing. U could pan/zoom the back, and anim on top layer. This could b eimproved to have scene support sp you could make more complex animations and overcome memory limitations.
An export function to save the animation with good quality to the card will be a plus.
I'll try to sketch a couple of ideas for a UI, with an interesting featureset.
To refrase.
Get to the point.
Simple drawing tools to start.
Layers, onion-skining (1,2 steps)
Scenes.
Good media management.
Hope this gets up the ground strongly and develops to be a nice little app.
I have a DS-X, and will gladly test it, but with the latest DLDI implemented , u shouldn't have much trouble. Focus on the app, not on the devices, the ones that really aren't that well supported, will mostly have to deal with it, or get a new card to run it. Otherwise, you will spend loads of time dealing with these problems instead of concentrating on app itself. That's my view on it at least.
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DS-Xtreme 4Gb [Fw 1.1.2]
#137074 - bean_xp - Tue Aug 07, 2007 7:47 pm
I personally would be looking for frame based raster animation (Like animated gif format), similar in function to a flip book.
I think it would be cool for the option of doing smaller "pixel-art" style animations, alongside bigger images. Differences between the two would most likely just be the "painting" tools (Pixel Brush/Soft Brush) and also the zoom on the image.
#137085 - alfatreze - Tue Aug 07, 2007 8:57 pm
Well, actually that would be the only way it would work, vectors would be extremely hard to implement, since the rely hevily on floating point calculations, which the DS is very weak at. Devs tend to rely on fixed point tables to overcome this.
A nice zoom system and good palette management would be essencial for pixel art though.
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DS-Xtreme 4Gb [Fw 1.1.2]
#137118 - Lick - Wed Aug 08, 2007 1:46 am
Actually, fixed point math is great since the pixel resolution of the DS doesn't require high-res precision anyway.
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#137203 - Dood77 - Wed Aug 08, 2007 8:32 pm
Unless you wanted zooming, or tweening stretching-and-shrinking.
...right?
_________________
If I use a term wrong or something then feel free to correct, I?m not much of a programmer.
Original DS Phat obtained on day of release + flashme v7
Supercard: miniSD, Kingston 1GB, Kingston 2GB
Ralink chipset PCI NIC
#137218 - Lick - Wed Aug 08, 2007 9:55 pm
8.8 = 255.(1/255=0.004)
16.16 = 65535.(1/65535=0.00002)
With an output- and also input resolution of 256x192, I think fixed point is good enough for anything. ^_^
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#137229 - Dood77 - Thu Aug 09, 2007 2:08 am
Ah, I think I get it now.
...well not so much the numbers, but the resolution thing I get :P
*cough*see my sig*cough*
_________________
If I use a term wrong or something then feel free to correct, I?m not much of a programmer.
Original DS Phat obtained on day of release + flashme v7
Supercard: miniSD, Kingston 1GB, Kingston 2GB
Ralink chipset PCI NIC
#137354 - Nubia - Fri Aug 10, 2007 6:56 pm
That would be nice. Colors! doesn't offer that option so i would use it.
#137862 - muchachotron - Thu Aug 16, 2007 8:32 pm
i agree that the drawing aspects of actionanimation should be a low priority at this point, since other developers are working solely on drawing rather than on animation.
aaron, perhaps you could team up with jesse (jens), the developer of colors!. he's really nailed drawing on the ds.
i have a few ideas about where you could go with this, though they are not exactly the frame-by-frame drawing and onion skinning approach that has been discussed:
- create "symbols" out of small drawings, like movie clips or graphic objects in flash, that are able to be moved via keyframes and anchor points. this way, "cut-out" animations could be made. i think tweening the x/y/scale of a contained object would be easier than trying to tween drawn strokes. maybe you could add in motion guides, like in flash, where you'd draw a motion path with the stylus and the object could follow that path over time. if these objects could have their own little looping animations, that would be awesome. symbols could be saved into a library that could be pulled from later, or even shared on the internet. if there were a timeline, you could even record sounds with the mic or drop them in from a computer.
- make a grid (big blocks, user-selectable grid size i.e. 10x10 or 128x128) and a color picker, and fill in the grid blocks. copy the previous frame and slightly change the colors/positions of the grid blocks. zoom this grid out, or keep it big, to view the animation. voila! a pixel animator.
i'd love to help dev. on this, but i don't know anything about coding for the ds (i'd be working on one myself, had i the knowledge :) ). i'm a lowly actionscripter, myself, and i'm on a mac. if y'all have any guidance on how i could start learning how to develop on the ds in my situation, please lemme know!
aaron, what do you think about my suggestions? make sense? i'd love to see any of the animation concepts. remember that a very important aspect of this animation app would be to save the animations in a way that they could be replayed - at the very least on another person's ds after they download the animation onto their homebrew card, or (preferably) as an animated gif or something that could be viewed on a computer. maybe make a companion app for the computer that can translate the ds animation file into a gif or video.
#137893 - AaronBlood10 - Fri Aug 17, 2007 4:49 am
Hey everyone,
Thanks a lot for the suggestions. The whole concept of the application is really starting to come together in my mind thanks to your ideas. I really want to implement a lot of the features described, such as onion skinning, motion tweening, and pixel animations. What I plan on doing is to release a lot of minor updates and adding features one at a time to gradually progress to a program with a ton of features.
As for the format, I've been thinking about using my own simple format with all the colors stored by numbers that could then be written on the flash cart. I also might add a way to convert these to a normal format to use on the computer, though I haven't figured out how exactly I'm going to do that yet.
And just a heads up, I have a whole week off from school to work on it. So, hopefully you'll see a release sometime late next week.
_________________
Animation program for the DS in progress
actionanimation.blogspot.com
#137969 - Dood77 - Sat Aug 18, 2007 4:03 am
Good luck!
_________________
If I use a term wrong or something then feel free to correct, I?m not much of a programmer.
Original DS Phat obtained on day of release + flashme v7
Supercard: miniSD, Kingston 1GB, Kingston 2GB
Ralink chipset PCI NIC
#139099 - DekuTree64 - Sat Sep 01, 2007 11:09 pm
So how is this project going? No blog updates or anything. You can't just leave us in the dark for this long :)
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#139107 - madwurmz.com - Sun Sep 02, 2007 1:08 am
http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=14023
.. a link to Flickbook, and I see a post by AaronBlood10 over there :)
A funny race between developers to see who will get a first working tool
:)
I would like to have a tool to make animations like the "stereo" video-clip with John Legend, making those growing lines in Adobe Flash is a so time-consuming!
#139117 - AaronBlood10 - Sun Sep 02, 2007 5:35 am
Oh I'm sorry guys. I have a tendency to underestimate things. I was planning on working on it while at the library when I was visiting my sister, but there was no wifi. So, I haven't had as much time to work on it.
_________________
Animation program for the DS in progress
actionanimation.blogspot.com