Alpha names and ignored newlines in SystemAssets animation.txt files

[AdamsImmersive (Morgan)]

It can get tricky to manage complex animations as text files for card-highlighted and icon-highlighted. Two things would be a big help if practical:

1. Allow alphanumeric file names (even without spaces/special chars) instead of just numbered PNGs.

And/or something even simpler:

2. Ignore newlines within the .txt files, since line breaks and blank lines could help organize the frames in a human-readable way. (Currently, newlines crash the system.)

(The same would be great for launchImages, but there’s no .txt file support for that, as far as I know?)

P.S. I have a newline workaround for now: compose animation.txt in a rich text app like TextEdit, with ONE tab stop defined in the ruler at far left. Then Tab acts much like Return/Enter. And then when you copy-paste into the final animation.txt, tabs (like extra spaces) are already safely ignored there.

[AdamsImmersive (Morgan)]

These enhancements would be great natively in the SDK. In the meantime, I made a Nova extension for them:

Here’s a Nova Extension to help work with animation.txt files

I made an extension for Panic’s Nova code editor (which has great integration with the Playdate SDK!) to make it easier to create the animation.txt files for launch card animations, and to edit them later. Grab it here! In short, you can use names for your images and format things with newlines and whitespace for readability and flexibility. Then this extension converts it all to the official less-friendly format. What this does is pretty basic, and I can imagine lots more that could be done…