krtaylor wrote:Since you have such a tool, gmyx, can you use it to make the captures? If you don't have an animated-GRF maker, you can ZIP up all the files, numbered in order, and I'll make an animated GRF out of them with my tool, if you like.
I will do some samples and upload them here.
eis_os wrote:Hmm, let me rethink about it. If you take screenshots via an external app you get truecolor files, thats silly, TTD only uses 256 colors, and it needs to be resampled for useing as gif.
It can capture at 256 while the screen is at 16/24/32 bits.
Here is my first try. It is bassed on one of my saved games. It about 15 seconds of game play. I still have some things to work out (it was jerky) but it work very well. I added a time stamp just for verification purposes. It will not always be there.
Did you remove the silly _125 and _201? The wonders of the attachment mod; now it breaks spanned archives too. Or maybe the authenticity verification broke things. But I suspect it's the first. What are you using for UnRARing? I checked with both WinRAR and 7-Zip; both behaved perfectly once I fixed the names.
If all else fails, the attached archive contains the same images, saved as BMP instead of PNG. (Sorry, ZIP is above the 2MB limit regardless of whether it contains BMP or PNG.)
DaleStan wrote:Did you remove the silly _125 and _201?
No. But I tried again, and did this time, and it still didn't work. Your new file doesn't work either. Can you do ZIP? If necessary, use two ZIPs, and for goodness' sake don't span them!
Development Projects Site: http://www.as-st.com/ttd
Japan, American Transition, Planeset, and Project Generic Stations available there
That's a particularly useless example of an animation though.
We want tutorials. For that, you need to minimize the extraneous information, i.e. make small stations with as few trains as necessary to display what you want to show.
The screen size is also too big, for no benefit.
I think for example, a tutorial about presignals could work like this.
*Why you need pre-signals*
Show a short animation featuring a small segment of a terminus station entrance, showing trains arrive and then one train blocking the entrance.
*How to build pre-signals*
Show a short animation of above entrance, with the signals tool being used to place and convert signals; overlay a picture of a Ctrl key being pressed and released at the right times.
*How they work*
Show a short animation featuring above entrance, as various trains arrive and leave, making sure to focus (i.e. center) or the pre-signal and how it behaves, maybe overlay a magnification of the pre- and exit signals in question.
...etc, the point being that you focus on a short task and show only what's important to that task, and exclude as much as possible of other things going on that have nothing to do with it and would only distract.
I see 2 trains using the same piece of track in that image. Have you pressed the "skip lights" button? I also see a yellow light which should be red as there is traffic on that segment.
For one thing, there's no excuse for using 1024x768 resolution. The default, which I think is 640x480, is MORE than ample to demonstrate something, and will save a lot of space. I also think we could take pictures more frequently so the image works better.
Development Projects Site: http://www.as-st.com/ttd
Japan, American Transition, Planeset, and Project Generic Stations available there
krtaylor wrote:For one thing, there's no excuse for using 1024x768 resolution. The default, which I think is 640x480, is MORE than ample to demonstrate something, and will save a lot of space. I also think we could take pictures more frequently so the image works better.
and Patchman wrote:That's a particularly useless example of an animation though.
We want tutorials. For that, you need to minimize the extraneous information, i.e. make small stations with as few trains as necessary to display what you want to show.
The screen size is also too big, for no benefit.
Of couse it's overkill. I just did a quick one to see how well it works. I took an save game and "recorded" it. And kept all my settings the same. I'm sure it will work much better at the lower resolution with much less happening in the game (It has 170+ trains in that one). The real ones will need to be properly prepared for this to work.
Well, you've got the tool. If you can make some tutorials, I'll turn them into animated GIFs like I did with the first one.
My GIF maker is actually pretty sophisticated. I can make one frame stay put for extra long, so if you draw in an arrow, I can make that stay for a while to catch someone's attention. Or you can put a text explanation up, that also stays for a while.
Development Projects Site: http://www.as-st.com/ttd
Japan, American Transition, Planeset, and Project Generic Stations available there
This is totally off-topic, but you can make short animations with TTD by clearing out your screenshots, then going in-game and holding Ctrl-S. Then just place the images together in a GIF, and you're good!