SSH's Walkcycle generator
Makes walkcycles easy... and can be used as a Paint program too.
AGS games have characters who walk around and the animations for their walking are called walkcycles. However, they are quite difficult to do for those new to making advneture games, ever though many people follow the excellent tutorials at . So, I took those tutorials and tried to make the use of them easier: you draw the body parts and this program glues them together and animated them!
Now loads walkcycle details from an XML file that you can edit yourself
Download the Walkcycle generator here
For the unsupported broken hi-res version, see further down the page
Please comment and make suggestions for improvements!
Screenshots:
Examples of walkcycles (that somehow got their heads chopped off...)
VERSION HISTORY:
- v1.01 bug fixes
- v1.02 with Undo and a small palette of colours
- v1.03 tooltips and bug fixes
- v1.04 fixed DeepHitz's problem
- v1.05 fixed AJA and pslim's bugs and a few others I found in the process
- v1.10 added XML import and provided Right and Front walkcycle XMLs
Instructions
Animation
The program starts with an walkcycle animation running. You can turn on the "skeleton" of the walkcycle by clicking on the button under the animation with the white figure on it. You can also toggle the sprites by clicking on the button beside it. The buttons next to those are Play/pause and Single-step. These allow you to stop and start the animation, or look at individual frames.
You can save the whole animation as a series of bitmaps by clicking the "Save Walkcycle" button which is down in the bottom-right of the screen. You can change the animation speed by opening Animation properties: just click on the animation. On the dialog that opens, you can enter a frame delay for the animation. You can also choose an image to be used as the background of the animation display, or with the properties open, move the RGB sliders in the bottom-left of the screen to adjust the BG colour. Here you can also load a new XML file from disk. The default XML file loaded at startup is called WCGen.xml.
Bone Select/Info
In the top-middle of the screen, you can select a "Bone" of the skeleton. The information on the bone appears to the right. The bone length is the size of the skeleton bone. Width and height describe the sprite, which you can see too. If you click on the sprite you can edit it in the bottom half of the screen (more later). The sprite is drawn in the animation centred on the bone, but you can also change the X and Y offsets in the info pane.
Sprite Editor
You can edit sprites here that you have loaded in from the Bone Info or from a file. Once edited, sprites can be saved or applied to the currently selected Bone. Note that with all sprites in the editor and loading from disk that AGS Runtime treats pure magenta (R=255, G=0, B=255) as transparent, so paint any areas that you want to to be transparent with this colour. AGS Runtime can also only handle BMP and PCX file formats.
The tools available are a brush (select circular or square, and the size in the GUI above the Paint tools); Dropper (click to pick up colour from image); Flood Fill; Line; Select; Cut; Copy; Paste; Colour Replace. Note that with all operations, dragging doesn't really work: e.g. select an area by clicking and then clicking again, rather than dragging.
NB: The undo button only undoes Paint operations.
XML
TO BE CONTINUED...