May I suggest...

[Solecord]

Delete old messages.

[MadGypsy]

I guess I dont need to mention how difficult it was to take those 15 in-game screenshots for the GIF creation

Wow, that's the hardest possible way to do it. As you can see from my swf re-creation, I faked it to a very similar degree (within the 90 percentile). I could have just as easily exported it as a gif but the "contest" was to get the file as small as possible. Next time you need to make an animated gif like that. Send me your base image (screenshot), a vid of what it needs to do and the frame count. I can fake it, export it as a gif and MH can reduce the file size.

Honorable mention: Madgypsy's .swf version. I'd prefer to go with a standardized raster graphic format rather than Flash due to portable devices.

I could have easily exported it as Flash Lite and any mobile device that is capable of coming to this site would have seen it (even a PSP). A lot of people may not know this but most of those Blackberry/Iphone/etc apps are made in flash CS5 or Flex (basically the same thing - they use the same program language AS3)

Gypsy

[MH]

Because I couldn't resist one last attempt, here's a 190k non-skippy version.

[MadGypsy]

When I originally faked your "Tween" there wasn't even the very very slight "skip" that is found in your original animation Seven. It was so smooth that it didn't look good. I actually had to make a more advanced tween that forced some "skipping" to make it match yours. So, I can tell you that you picked the perfect amount of frames. Any smoother and it looked fake, any "skippier" and it looked half-ass.

It's amazing how even the most simple animations are hard to reproduce. Between trying to match the size, spacing and coloring of your lights, to trying to properly manipulate my MovieClips to match the correct 3D perspective in 2D space, to faking the proper "skippage" of frames - your simple light animation became not so simple.

Gypsy

[Seven]

Hello,

interesting to see how much potential we have here in this forum.

Yes, just like MadGypsy said:
This shader animated b_box uses 30 frames to be smooth.
I wasnt happy with anything less than that because it looked skippy/choppy.
There are 15 different textures for the DarkPlaces shader (15 to move right and the same 15 to move left again).
Thanks to OoPpEe´s smart modeling/UV-mapping I didnt need to use the complete b_box texture 15 times.
It was only necessary to have 15 different "bar"-textures and only 1 complete b_box texture.


I guess I dont need to mention how difficult it was to take those 15 in-game screenshots for the GIF creation
Now multiply it with the 14 different ammo types and you get an idea how long it took me to create this thread.
....many many hours.


It is OK for me to have a skippy/choppy GIF on the news page.
It is good enough to make people curious and maybe klick on it.

Thank you MadGypsy and MH for your time and effort to contribute in this wired contest
In the end, the most important thing for me is, that Baker will not get any trouble for his wonderful news-page.

Kind regards,
Seven

[MadGypsy]

dang , and I got it to half his size with no keyframe skipping at the same resolution

edit: lol, you know I'm bored. I have stripped it down to 36.9kb from 1.3mb that is 97.17% reduction. No resolution loss, no keyframe skipping. Updated in my link above.

[Baker]

And here it is at 112k:



Could probably halve that again using the backwards trick.

I could believe a 50% file size reduction. Over a 90% file size reduction is a bit of a shock.

Winner. Will update the image tomorrow around 1 PM +/-. Don't have decent FTP right now, using satellite internet atm.

Honorable mention: Madgypsy's .swf version. I'd prefer to go with a standardized raster graphic format rather than Flash due to portable devices.

[MadGypsy]

http://freemarket.net16.net/qomisc/box.html

I faked the animation and got it to 56k with no resolution reduction and no sacrificing of keyframes. However, it is not identical it is just very similar. There is no way I could get it any smaller than this and retain the resolution. I could maaaaybe get it like 1k smaller if I wrote more abstract code. Instead of just doubling up the code and changing the instance name for the MovieClip it applies to.

Gypsy

[MadGypsy]

MadGypsy if I ever offer you 10X more money (salary) to do the same job... will you accept some compromises??

I'm always willing to provide my skills (whichever ones we are referring to) and compromises can always be made.

[metchsteekle]

Yeah, one of the things I did was drop every second frame.

Excellent, now we can make a 24 hour tv show of just this image forever with out any time overlap!

[MH]

Yeah, one of the things I did was drop every second frame.

[MadGypsy]

one thing i did notice is that MH's animation is "skippy". Watch the bars. Mine is identical to Sevens (and 5+ times larger than MH's), so....

[MadGypsy]

dang that 112 crushed my 597. I don't know how to do image stuff I'm just a flash junkie so... I gave it my best shot.

@Qmark its 31 images originally. I originally made it 16 and reversed it but then realized 1 and 16 were the same pic so, I used 1 with a belated 2 thru 15 and then 1 shows up again (but was always there) and reverses thru 15 to 1 then starts over. Basically, you arent going to do it in less than 16 pics.

However, I could get it SUPER small if I recoded the animation part with a loop created and code "alphad" vector graphic over just the first image. I bet I could get it to about 40k. However, I'm not wasting my whole night on that LOL.

[MH]

And here it is at 112k:



Could probably halve that again using the backwards trick.

[Mindf!3ldzX]

Fok!!