Guidelines:Animated PNGs

Overview are similar, but preferable, to that we use on Zelda Wiki. It is recommended that you upload files instead of gifs as these align with our standard of using png files, which means that people looking for a given file are more likely to find a png instead of a gif. Therefore, pngs are more likely to be used than gifs across the site.

Creating an Animated PNG
There are methods of creating and converting gifs to pngs. The method that we recommend is with GIMP, an open source image editing program. In this process, we will be creating a gif file and converting it into an animated png.

The first step is to have a of the sprite you wish to animate. A good resource for these is The Spriters Resource. When using images provided by other websites, please be sure to attribute the source accordingly.

The second thing you will need is an understanding of how the sprites are meant to appear in-game. Animated sprites run on intervals of miliseconds, and so they need to be timed accordingly to be convincing and accurate to their in-game depictions. You can either find or make a recording of the sprite playing in motion in-game to assist with this. The most ideal format for this is a video that allows you to advance frame by frame. This way, you can count how many frames a given sprite is meant to appear. (In some advanced cases, some sprite animations use the same sprite texture but change the position of the texture depending on the frame itself.)

Once you know how many frames appear for a given sprite, you can then divide the number of frames by the of the game to get the milisecond duration the given sprite should play at (rounded up and then multiplied by 1000). For instance, if a given texture plays for 8 frames in a 30 fps game, that comes out to. After rounding and multiplying, you get 270ms. Sprite textures generally advance at the same intervals, but this isn't always the case.

For this demonstration, we will be animating the idle sprite for CoH: from. The sprite sheet for this can be found at The Spriters Resource.

There are more sprites than we need from the sprite sheet given, so we need to condense it down to just what we need to work with. For this, you can use the Rectangle Select Tool in the toolbar.