czwartek, 9 sierpnia 2012

PETSCII Animation: Vroom vroom

An excercise in parallax scrolling - A looped animation of a car going past posts and hills and a ship with sea and clouds in the background.



I did this with no theory behind me at all, so I just matched the tempo of different layers to fit within 40 frames of animation. The posts move by 8 positions a frame, the brighter hills by 4 positions a frame, the darker hills by 2 positions a frame, the ship by 1 position a frame.

The animation was made by a wonderful free piece of software "C64 ASCII Art Editor" by RADSOFT.

I cannot recommend it enough, it is incredibly detailed with many options not provided by the other program I use, Dennis Busch's PETSCII Paint. It has the animation option with which you can create your own PETSCII animations, with included export to GIF or AVI! So the picture above was fully animated in AAE.

The one advantage that PP has over AAE is that you can select custom background and foreground color for each sign. IN AAE there is only one possible background color for the whole screen. That is why I had to use full blocks of color instead of varied petscii characters, which is a pity. I only used the corners for the boat in the background since I set the sky's color as the background.