And how can I use your tool?

First, you have to render/paint/rip a animation. It HAS to be 320x200, or, if you want to make an old, $<$ OPENCP 2.0q, animation, 160x100. In case you didn't notice, the OPENCP 2.0q and higher has a new WürfelMode, called WürfelMode ][ , with support for 320x200 pixels images, instead of the lowres 160x100 ones.

Your animation should be in the form of many, many .pcx files, called for example PIC000.PCX, PIC001.PCX, PIC002.PCX and so on. They must have only 256 colors, and they should have all the same palette. If they don't have the same palette, the palette will be aligned. But my calculation of this isn't very good (but it works :), so for BEST results you have to do this in your favourite picture-editing-program. Next, you have to create a script. This script contains informations about the filenames of your frames, and a some other stuff.

The script has the following format:

Version
[SFO] RLECompression
Title
NumFrames Delay Filename
[NumFrames Delay Filename]
[NumFrames Delay Filename]
[...                     ]

Version

is either 0 or 1, 0 for 160x100 animations, 1 for 320x200. If you want to create a Version 0-animation, SFO should be set to 1, if you want to create a Version 1-animtion, SFO has to be left out. ^11.1

RLECompression

should be set to 1, it compresses the Animation a little bit.

Title

is the title of the animation, it shouldn't be longer than 31 chars, it's displayed inside the fileselector of OPENCP.

After this header, a random number of section follows (but at least ONE ;).

Every section describes a sequence of some PCXs. In the final animation, all sections are joint together.

NumFrames

is the number of frames in this sequence. For example, if you have PCXs that are named from PIC000.PCX up to PIC199.PCX, NumFrames should be 200.

Delay

is handled a little bit different in the two versions. If you want to create a Version 0-animation, a Delay of 1 means a framerate of about 21.3 frames per second, a Delay of 2 is about 10.65 fps (the half), a Delay of 3 is about 7.1 (a third) and so on.

If you want to create a Version 1-animation, Delay is 65536/desired fps, so if you want to have 15fps, "Delay" should be 4369. This value has to be BELOW 65536 (and above 0, of course :)

Filename

is the filename of your sequence. Because most animations have more than 1 frame, you can use %d (and other C-printf placeholders). For people whose native language is not C, here some short examples:

filename	framenumber	real filename
pic%d.pcx	0	pic0.pcx
	1	pic1.pcx
	2	pic2.pcx
	3	pic3.pcx
	9	pic9.pcx
	10	pic10.pcx
	11	pic11.pcx
pic%03d.pcx	0	pic000.pcx
	1	pic001.pcx
	2	pic002.pcx
	3	pic003.pcx
	9	pic009.pcx
	10	pic010.pcx
	11	pic011.pcx

The framenumber always starts with 0, not with 1, keep this in mind!

Here is an example script: (version 0)

0
1 1
a basic cubic-player animation
11 2 intro%d.pcx
200 1 ani%03d.pcx

This animation would have 211 frames (intro0.pcx to intro10.pcx, then ani000.pcx to ani199.pcx).

And here again one for version 1:

1
1
an enhanced OpenCP animation
11 3072 intro%x.pcx
200 1000 ani%03d.pcx

To create the animation, just type in
wap <scriptfilename.scr> <outputfilename.dat>
and hit <Enter>.

The WürfelAnimator will now try to make the animation. To view the animation inside OPENCP, rename the created .dat-file to cpani001.dat (or cpani002.dat and so on...) and press <w> inside the player.

Anyway, maybe you have some fun with this tool.

Footnotes

... out.^11.1

If you're interested what this value means, well, just get the original documentation for professionals, it's described there