Creating animated PNG images for GameEx

[Draco1962]

For those interested in taking advantage of animated PNG support in GameEx and GameEx Arcade edition of your theme and game logo files, you may want to give the Image to GIF or APNG application a go.

This was created with PinballX animations in mind, but will work with GameEx and other logo files as well. Special thanks to the talented @scutters for this creation!

Additionally, if you are using GIMP to create animated PNG images, you will also want to read this thread.

 

[Draco1962]

Please post your support questions and feature suggestions here:

 

[Draco1962]

A few from a default GameEx Theme Logo set using the merge highlight in white at 70% opacity.

 

[Draco1962]

Since they are apng format they may not display in the browser.

[Draco1962]

It may be due to the logo file sizes for APNG format. Here is one of the same files only in GIF format.

[Draco1962]

Here are some more in use within the GameEx Arcade Edition "Duality" theme:

 

[stigzler]

Just stumbled across this. Classy! I like.

[u-man]

Yeah, i gave this topic a like four years ago and now i want to give this a try. I did not know, that GameEx supports animated .png files, except for the selection bar. So i have some questions about this.

1. Can i use animated .png files for every item / .png file that GameEx is using for Themes? Or does it only work for Logos?
2. Can i organize these animated .png files? What I mean is, can i for example put them in a folder? Because if i do lets say a dozen Logo files, i will end up with several hundreds of .png files and if these files are just in the media/logo folder, organizing can get a nightmare .

Thx in advance, u-man

[Draco1962]

They are currently only supported in place of the logo files within the theme\media\logos and there is no way to direct GameEx to point to a separate folder (path) to find them.

[u-man]

Ok, so only logos are supported, that is still very nice and better than nothing. I will definitely try this, maybe i can fool GameEx with a shortcut/placeholder that points to a .png sequence inside of a folder. I will report back my results. Thanks, Draco .

[u-man]

Ok. today i gave this a try. I couldnt fool GameEx with shortcuts, but i also realized this is absolutely not necessary, as .apng files are a single file for a animation. I thought the outcome would be something like the "selected" bar animation, where you have numbered .png files. Problem is, no Adobe app can export this format. Tried your tool Draco, but i couldnt get it to work. Found this online tool, that is really good for novice/starters:
https://ezgif.com/apng-maker
Downside is, it is limited in filesize and duration for a file. My solution was to use this:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/apngasm/
It does not have this limits and i can convert a .png sequence (sadly no video) to .apng .

What I did not found, was a working "ping-pong" function, where the animation plays forward to the end and then plays reverted to the start again. It would be good to know, how to do this, as all my animations, would be half in size and still having a seemless loop.

Definitely like this new .apng feature, as you can do animated AND alpha blended Logos and the outcome is just one file. This was not possible before.


 

[Draco1962]

Did you see the Spinball app reference from this thread?

 

[u-man]

No, i did not ☺️ . They are lovely. I will post my MAME and MAME categories logos soon 😉 .
I would really like to know, how to enable the ping-pong feature with .apng files.
 

[Draco1962]

51 minutes ago, u-man said:

I would like to know, how to enable the ping-pong feature with .apng files.
 

What ping-pong feature are you referring to? 

For mine, I used Scutters' app exclusively. I would definitely read through his referenced thread if you do choose to use it. Lots of tips and tricks noted to using it in different ways. 

 

[u-man]

With ping-pong feature i mean the same behaviour like for the select-bar in the media folder. The select-bar consists of 15 .png files but plays back and forth inside of GameEx creating a 30 frames animation. I hoped that this is possible for .apng files too, but it seems we only have loop settings for how many times the .apng should loop (no loop, infinite loop and loop x times). There is no back and forth playing possible it seems.

[scutters]

2 hours ago, u-man said:

I would really like to know, how to enable the ping-pong feature with .apng files.

As far as i know there is no magic flag to enable a ping-pong / forward then reverse loop / patrol cycle style animation. I think the frames are just duplicated in reverse, happy to be corrected though!

For apngs my tip to keep file size down would be to minimize the change area between frames (only the rectangle of changed area of each frame is stored in the apng file- see http://littlesvr.ca/apng/inter-frame.html, which probably explains why a ping-pong loop without frame duplication wouldn't work) - and using something like pingo/pinga for compression (https://css-ig.net/)

[Draco1962]

11 hours ago, u-man said:

With ping-pong feature i mean the same behaviour like for the select-bar in the media folder. The select-bar consists of 15 .png files but plays back and forth inside of GameEx creating a 30 frames animation. I hoped that this is possible for .apng files too, but it seems we only have loop settings for how many times the .apng should loop (no loop, infinite loop and loop x times). There is no back and forth playing possible it seems.

Definitely out of the scope of the app and GameEx select bar. You could submit a feature request and, if it is possible and Tom sees merrit in the request, it might get implemented.

 

[u-man]

All good Draco , i dont think Tom can solve this, as this has to do with the codec definitions of the .apng file format. But i have some wishes, i want to post in the Feature-Request thread, that are solveable IMHO . My current tests with .apng Logo-files show that GameEx can handle files that are 8-10mb in size easily. Since GameEx can just show one Logo file at once per screen, i think i will be fine and safe. Great format, i wished we had this years ago.