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Animtron alpha release

I have created an animation studio that I use for my games, and feel it's polished enough to be released for early feedback.

Features:

  • Loading of any cart's gfx data
    • Might need to unsandbox Animtron to edit carts in RAM
  • Saving/loading animations to .pod files
  • LERPing, speed controls
  • Playback, looping, pingponging
  • Saves a bitfield (similar to the sprite one) per animation frame
    • Allowing you to specify what frames in the animation have special properties like:
    • invincibility frames, parry timing, etc.

Quick how-to:

  • Install by running load #animtron_01_1-0 in the Picotron terminal
  • Load a cart by clicking the appropriate button (you have to type the cart's name in the open box, can't just double-click)
  • Add frames by right-clicking in the sprite pane, or by clicking the appropriate insert button in the animation pane
    • Modify a frame's bits, flipx, flipy, and of course duration
    • Or use the handy LERP tool to generate decent frame durations
  • Play your animation with the playback toolbar at the bottom
  • Export your finished work!

Cart #animtron_01_1-0 | 2025-05-21 | Embed ▽ | No License
3

Feedback is (very) welcome

Please hit me up with feedback, I'd love to improve Animtron further and make it usable for others than just myself!

3

This is amazing!

This is an important tool that was missing from Picotron. I used this to see the animation of Mega Man run cycle for a Mega Man X prototype I'm working on.

I understand that creating a stable utility program is not simple. With that said here are some points of notice:

  • The program crashed on me a few times in a row (runtime error: out of memory). I was looping an animation of 10 frames of varying sizes (about 32x32 px). When I slowed it down using the 0.9x button it crashed.

  • Small improvement idea: it would be nice to scroll the frames using the mouse wheel

  • How do I access the .pod data in my source code?

Overall, awesome work!

Thank you so much for testing it and giving feedback!

That OOM crash doesn't sound good, will look at it asap!

Was the animation playing while it crashed? Weird that it would OOM at ten frames, I was benchmarking with 200 frames. I must have missed something!

As for the pod file, just put it in your cart somewhere and call:
fetch("path/to/file.pod")

The return value will be the object you see if you double click the pod file with all relevant info.



New version out, original post updated with new ID!

Fixed an out-of-memory bug when looping over animations with a 1-frame duration.
Thanks @BoiledToast64 for reporting it!



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