Send Bitmap (Animated Gif) to device

It would be incredibly helpfull if Send Bitmap could handle sending an animated gif to the device to preview in situ.
It'd make testing out animations, game concepts and ideas suuuper quick, especially for those of us who are not the programmers, but focusing on art and game design seperately. So yep, support of 1bit animated gifs being displayed on device when using Send Bitmap please!! :slight_smile:

1 Like

what i did at a certain point for my retrotime game, was use playorama which is a playdate video player, of footage of the colored windows version of my game that i recorded in greyscale and then converted using this to playdate video format. The conversion i did with crankplayer_convert.py but there is an online video converter as well i think but it was way too slow for my needs the ffmpeg + that python script way was way faster for my video. however for little animations you could probably use the online converter so even if this never gets added there currently is already a way todo this although not as fast as just uploading a gif

1 Like

Ooo! this might just work. I've just tested converting a 1bit gif to a mp4, then converting via that site. Seems to convert well. Just need to wait till my playdate is charged to test in on device! Thanks for the heads up.

Though being able to send 1 bit animated gifs to device would still be a million times better ! :pray: :pray: :pray:

It's quite a faff, and convoluted, but it does seem to work. As long as I switch off any decombing filters when I convert my gif/animation to an mp4, it converts quite nice and sharply. The video of it is bit blured, but the mockup art below shows how it looks on device.

20231107_194706

yeah it's not as easy as just sending a gif would be. Is the blurring perhaps comming from having too high compression rate on the mp4 ? normally you can choose compression level (at least in ffmpeg)

There's no bluring insitu on device - that's just the gif/video I recorded of it on device being squished down! Looks all good.

ah cool good to know had misunderstood it :slight_smile:

I only used this method to know if my 1280x720 would actually work on the playdate system when downscaled (like if things would still work out or so) i remember it being cool to view the game "running" (well through means of a video) on the playdate without having coded it yet

1 Like

I'll get this added as a feature request, it would be nice to preview animations on device.

3 Likes