Creating animated GIFs

[gianmichele]

Any way to create animated GIFs straight out of love?

I have my replay system working now and would love to save a small GIF of that

[Davidobot]

I'm not sure if this will help, but I found this:
https://ittner.github.io/lua-gd/manual.html
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1664 ... 1#16649681

[undef]

You can make a screenshot and save it as a png every single frame and then make a gif from that.
Make sure to set a fixed frame length (don't use dt, but use a fixed time step to update your game).

Code: Select all

local frame = 0
function love.update( dt )
    dt = 1/60 -- this way your gif will be at 60 fps
    frame = frame + 1
    local s = love.graphics.newScreenshot()
    s:encode( string.format( "recording/%012d.png", frame ) )
end

Then you can use ffmpeg or imagemagick to glue it together:

Code: Select all

-- before closing your game you can run this if you have ffmpeg installed (don't know if this works on windows)
os.execute( "ffmpeg -i " .. love.filesystem.getSaveDirectory() .. "/recording/%012d.png " .. name )

[gianmichele]

I'm looking at a pure lua (or FFI) encoder, since this needs to run without any external tool.

Can't really find anything on the web, but there's a lot of javascript encoders that I can use as a reference. Will keep you posted if I can do or find something useful

[Nixola]

You could try "porting" this to the FFI: http://sydney.edu.au/engineering/it/~gr ... bgif/gif.c

[zorg]

I have a semi-workable solution:
Let's assume that you can store the replay data, and can "replay" it without the need for it to run "realtime".

1. Your game records a replay.
2. Replay is stored somewhere. (either in memory or dumped to the harddrive, or both)
3. If the user wants to generate a gif of their run, have a function that simulates the game loop, but can take more time than when it would be played back in realtime.
4. For each frame defined by the replay system, call love.graphics.newScreenshot (or if you're smart, render everything to a canvas in the above function, and get an imagedata from it.
5. Use a 3rd party lib (either written in lua, or c and loaded in with the FFI) to create a GIF. The lib should be able to receive each frame separately though!
6. Finally, export that final gif file.

If you do go with lg.newScreenshot instead of using a canvas and getting its imagedata, you should call that in a very specific spot; sadly, i don't remember whether it was before or after love.graphics.present was called (or some other function even)
I realize this isn't the clearest explanation, i'll try to re-word it later if i have time.

[Nixola]

You do not have to worry about love.graphics.present, you can take a screenshot at the end of love.draw (so, before it). I've had similar concerns in the past, ended up calling it after love.graphics.present and everything was screwed up on pretty much any other PC, as the buffer was filled with garbage.

[rmcode]

This was posted on itch.io a few days ago:

http://itch.io/t/12612/creating-a-gif-for-your-game

EDIT: argh ... didn't read the "directly out of löve" part

EDIT 2: aaaaaaan a double post for good measure