A Brief and Expedited Walkthrough of the Animation Editor (part 1) (Patreon)

dark patreon show us the emebedded images
...wait, there's no way that hasn't been requested before-- *googles it*
it's an account setting!!! and it's on now!!! i can put memes directly in these posts now!!!!!!

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa (it won't show up on android tho)

okay well that's going to make this and all subsequent posts a lot easier

so today i thought i'd walk you through the anim editor. it's specifically created for Essentials, but is pretty much just based RMXP's built-in editor. the main difference is that the Essentials one writes to its own file, has things specifically positioned for a Pokemon-style battle, and feels like absolute balls to use because you have to click the menu controls a million times instead of just typing in numbers like a normal, sane person. 

So let's get started!

above is the animation editor. please excuse the meme text-- it's entirely inaccurate because the lingering shadow of dat boi is in the bottom left corner. inuki sometimes has a little too much fun. 

this is the animation sheet roll. by the way i don't actually know what the proper names for any of these elements are, so you get the names i made up, or am making up on the spot. i don't even know if these things have proper names, but nobody can contest me on them so we're just gonna go with it.

animation sheet roll- scrolls left, scrolls right, select a cell and drop it into the main animation area. we define a file for it to use from Graphics/Animations/ using the Set Animation Sheet button. Those files look like this , and I am not going to embed it because it is approximately giant as fuck.

The animation sheets are graphic tiles of 5 columns by however many rows you bloody want. The cells themselves are 192x192, but since Reborn uses 2x resolution graphics to create a 3rd gen style, we only have a 96x96 area to work with. However, that is almost always enough.

this button brings up this list: 

which it may surprise you to learn, is called the List of Animations. You may notice that it is Very Large. It can be scrolled through "quickly" with the Page Up and Page Down (and also Q/W) keys. Unfortunately it cannot be searched within. This means if you have a lot of animations and you don't remember exactly which number each one is, this song applies directly to you . To solve this, we (eventually) created a file which is surprisingly named Animation List.txt. It will further surprise you to know that this file contains a list of all animations in the List of Animations. For our specific purposes it also notes who originally made each animation. Here's part of it: 

This allows us to Ctrl+F for any move we want and not cry ourselves to sleep every night as we once again attempted to sift through the myriad entries for the single one we wanted to find. 

You might notice that some moves are listed twice as an OppMove. This is the version of the animation that plays when the opponent uses the move. We have to make these for some, but not all moves in order to make them work right in reverse. There are specific reasons we would need to do this, but I will go into those on a post that is not this one. 

You might also notice that we have almost 900 animations. A keen-but-not-too-keen reader might be confused as to why we have that many when there are definitely not even 800 moves in the game. It is because many moves have that second Opp version, and also because of shit like this, 

which once caused a very funny gitch with Icicle Spear because Icicle Spear forgot to do That and so it would just play all of the moves listed after it for each hit instead. At the time, it was something like: Icicle Spear, High Jump Kick, Iron Head, some fire move, god knows what else. It was Very Silly but that did not make it hurt any less when Serra's Cloyster was sweeping you with it. 

The List of Animations is the navigational piece between all stored animations in the game. It also lets you set the name of the animation file:

Syntax is important with names. Move: will be used for the oppponent if OppMove: does not exist. There are also Common:'s for things like weather, status, etc. The move name should match the internal name in moves.txt. The only animations for which name syntax is not important is the follow up hits of multi-hit moves such as Bullet Seed shown above. It just moves down through the animation list, which is why the Icicle Spear glitch existed. Instead of writing "Bullet Seed hit n" eight times, I could have just complained in the animation names about this editor being incredibly inconvenient. I was tempted to. But I did not.

Let's go over these buttons:

• The Play Animation button Plays the Animation. sugoi. It is helpful but not especially helpful because it often does not appear in game as it appears in the editor.
• The Play Opp Animation plays the currently loaded animation (regardless of if it is Move: or OppMove: from the opposite direction). This button is actually very useful because it lets us tell pretty easily if we need to make a separate Opp for it. Unfortunately this button did not always exist, and back then life was a bleak, bleak existence where we had to go load it up in-game and convince the AI to use the move before deciding if we needed to make a separate one.
• Import Animation imports an animation, name and all, into the List of Animations. I don't know why this option isn't in the List of Animations itself. That would be very convenient-- too convenient, some would say. I suppose that is why it is not there. It looks for .anm files to import from the game's root folder. 
• The Export Animation exports the animation to a .anm file in the game's root folder. This is almost very convenient, except every time we used to use it it would tell us that it exported the animation to a .anm file in the game's root folder. About three hundred animation files in, we got tired of being told that it had exported the animation to a .anm file in the game's root folder, so we nuked those messages from orbit. It would also be convenient if this were in the List of Animations. But it is not.
• The Help button is actually not what you would expect. One might expect that when clicked, a Help button would produce an array of informative text, or switch the UI to a mode that lets you click on elements to learn about them, or that it would give you some advice or suggestions of how to recover from the grave sin you made in deciding to use this editor. It does none of these things. Instead, it produces this message:

"But Ame," you might be thinking, "that actually seems like relevant and useful information!" You are right. It is. Unfortunately it is not so relevant that one needs a whole button in-editor dedicated to it. It would be more practical and more accessible to put it in a Read Me for the animation editor or something. In fact, there are many other things that could go in such a Read Me, such as literally everything I've typed above, not to mention the things I have yet to say. Alternatively, those things could go into a scrollable text menu accessed by this button. But neither of those things is the case, and instead it just has this. That is why I am upset with it.

If you are making animations and require Help, I implore you to believe-- this button will not give it to you. It will not tell you how to do what you are trying to do. It will not tell you the names of any of these elements. It will not tell you about a feature that it might otherwise have taken you and a team of five other people a year to discover. But it will make you believe it can do all of those things, and then it will laugh in your face, and leave you crying and alone in a sea of graphics and code with barely a plank of wood as your raft, just like your father did all those years ago.

These are the frame settings:

You might think this is fairly intuitive. Click on the Total Frames button to set how many frames the animation lasts. Click the arrows around the Frame entry in order to move through them. This is almost useful, since you can play the animation at a slower rate by clicking through them, but it is not very helpful when you want to jump to a certain frame since you cannot just type it in like one would expect. 

Also, if you are on, say, Frame 20, and reduce the Total Frames to 18, the animation editor will probably crash. Please do not do this. I have lost many good animations to this bug which to this day I am aghast that it was not anticipated and solved for.

You might think that even after my having described this, it is fairly intuitive. And if you were to animate for a very long time, you might even be assured that you were right.  But you would not be right. Because you would not know about one more feature that exists in this section. In fact, it took me and a team of five other people upwards of a year to discover this feature, because the Help section did not care to tell us about it. 

If you right click the frame number, you can do several things with it:

These are all very helpful things to be able to do, and I appreciate them a lot. I would have appreciated them more if I knew they existed a long time ago, but unfortunately there is nothing to indicate that you can right click that frame, and is one of about three things in the entire animation editor that can be right clicked so why would anyone try to do that?

Well joke's on you, animation editor. Someone did. 

If, in the animation editor, you press a cancel button, it will ask you to save, and it will also ask you to leave. This is among one of the most inefficient ways I could imagine to do either of these things. For instance, a save button could replace the Help button which clearly does not do its job very well. Alternatively, a Quit button could go there instead. Or-- and this is crazy-- both! because there are blank spaces on the right menu that could be used that way. 

But again, that is not the case, and instead we do it this way, which results in me nearly closing the editor and not saving almost every time I try to back out of a menu. If I had a dollar for every time I did that, I would probably not need a Patreon.

There is much, much more to go over in this editor, but we will stop here for today because going over these things has filled me with equal parts salt and despair. It's at times like these I have to stress just how much I appreciate our animators for their hard work. I hope everyone else does too.