SELENA

More playing around with animations extracted from the World Map. Some of them are pretty easy to turn into GIFs, some of them are more challenging, some of them would be extremely difficult to impossible (for me) to do.

For example the astrodome (above) is two different animations, an 8-frame strip that does the shine crossing over the astrodome city, and a 13-frame strip that's the floating crystals. To make the above animation I used two loops of the crystals overlaid over mostly just 1 frame of the astrodome, with a single pass through the animation of the shine. Overall pretty simple.

The windmill village is a comparative level of difficultly; it's made by combining a 5-frame strip for the background of smaller windmills, and a 6-frame strip of the largest sail, for 30 frames in total so they both loop entirely.

I'm still not entirely happy with the Flotsam animation. The original indexed image has 'waves' moving outwards from the shapes where they meet the water, that fade off as they increase in size (at least as seen on the World Map). The fade gets lost in the process of turning the strip into a GIF, resulting in harder-edged 'waves', which isn't too annoying on a light background but is very obvious on a dark one. After multiple attempts, this is the best I was able to do.

Some of the strips would be MUCH more difficult to gif-ify. The Behemoth tree, for example, would require combining the trunk that's baked into this map tile...

...with a strip of treetop images where each frame of the tree looks something like this:

I spent a couple hours trying to get something that didn't look like shit and failed. Eventually I gave up (yes, since I'm in nature, the inability to GIF the Behemoth hurts me).

The World Pillar is a similar combination of a static map image part and an overlying animation, though there at least the more geometric shape of the pillar would be MUCH easier to cut free from the background, and the overlying pillar top doesn't have bits of background baked into it, so it's considerably more doable than the Behemoth.

Nothing in fire appears to be gifable; the only animations I've found there are three slightly different fixed translucent smoke images that just get moved around over top each other to fake animation. They look like so:

Anyway, I'll probably make more GIFs from the World Map in future, as the mood strikes. Not necessarily all landmarks, there's some very cute things like animated sharks and stingrays to be found in the resources.

Houston Astrodome