ID:61560
 
After, sadly, spending hours and hours importing Tayoko's spritesheets into .dmi and arranging them into proper animations and whatnot I developed an icon utility DM project. It takes in a .dmi that you've imported a spritesheet into and, with some prodding, (you have to manually insert the dimensions of the spritesheet) displays it in a grid. You then click two cells to define the start and endpoint of an animation. Then you name the animation via the icon_state input box and click the queue button. The new animation is then displayed below, in the queue, along with its defining parameters. Once you've concluded extracting animations from the spritesheet, you click the Export button and save your new animations in .dmi format. If you're masochistic you can load a .png but the format wacks out the grid.

If you can't decipher my ramblings above try these steps
1) Import a spritesheet that has side by side animation frames into a .dmi file.
2) Run the utility.
3) Type in the width and height of the spritesheet
4) Click the '...' button and open your .dmi file.
5) (optional) Click the 'eyedropper' button and the background color of the spritesheet. This sets the transparent color to the eyedropped value. (Hopefully your artist doesn't use the background color IN the sprites)
6) Click a starting point for an animation in the grid and then the ending point.
7) Fill in the icon_state input box with the name of the animation.
8) Press the 'Queue' button.
9) Repeat 6-8 until you are done extracting animations.
10) Press the 'Export' button, choose a filename and save location and click the 'Save' button.

I've already saved a good 30 minutes or more using this utility.

You can toy with it here, or to the side, if you'd like.

I specifically tailored it to Efencea's needs but that doesn't mean I can't upgrade or expand on it later. I just wanted to show it around a bit to see what people thought of it/the idea.

Thoughts? Comments? Let me hear them.

:) nice.
Good work!
That was a quick response, did you even try it out?
Sure didnt. Too busy. But if it works, then its definitely worth complimenting.
Not yet, will do in a few. Judging by the descrption you posted and how much time you yourself saved, I would assume it's a very reliable utility and an overall plus to developers/pixel artists.
Okay, haha.
Yep yep. this pretty much saves everyone the nightmare of importing and copy/pasting 32x32 frames into the right places.

Pretty awesome.
Just keep in mind Efencea doesn't have directional animations. ;)

So, if others take a liking to it I might have to make it support directional animations.
I have my own neat trick up my sleeves ;)

Basically, open up your image in something like MS Paint, select all (CTRL+A) then open up a dmi window, make sure that there's already atleast one 32x32 icon in the dmi then paste the whole image, tada! Your image is cut into pieces.
Haywire wrote:
Basically, open up your image in something like MS Paint, select all (CTRL+A) then open up a dmi window, make sure that there's already atleast one 32x32 icon in the dmi then paste the whole image, tada! Your image is cut into pieces.

That's not a trick you can import them directly into your .dmi file to split them into 32x32 icons. What you didn't realize is that the utility takes animation frames and puts them in an animated icon state and removes the background color for you.
Im pretty happy with this :D

Cheers!
I don't think anyone who's posted here has actually used this thing longer than 2 seconds, so you can't count on them for advice.

I just tried it for a while, and the main thing I would like to see changed is the thing at the bottom. When you make a mistake and add an icon state by accident (mostly when failing to put in an end coord) you click clear and instead of being able to clear one, you have to clear the entire thing.

What I would do is create a sort of help file to go along with it, as well as change the start and end coord, it would me way more convenient if you just clicked the square and it selected that automatically, and have a separate option to do it the old way in case you want to pick animations. I was using it for chipsets and it was useful, but some parts were a real pain considering it seems like it targets spritesheets and charsets.
I originally built it for myself, but seeing as how it seemed somewhat useful in general (I see a lot of people complaining about converting from spritesheets/charsets to .dmi) I put it out for others to use. If I were to add onto this project I would most likely rewrite it with javascript which would avoid BYOND's fugly grid controls. Either way the whole thing would need a lot of refining to make it fairly useful.
I like the whole 32x32 grids, it'd be cool if we could reposition the picture too with some NWES arrows, to isolate certain objects.