As those of you who have watched my sprite movies know, you can't pause any of them without it continuing to play, except for Phoenix Wrong: Appalling Justice. The reason being is because I put the sprites into a movie clip for the scene, then put movie clips inside of that for certain animations, in order to be able to resize them when needed so that they are the correct size and what have you. As you know, you can't pause a movie clip.

Well...I discovered a way, quite by accident, which enables me to enlarge or shrink the sprites as needed, but also allow the viewer to pause the movie. Yeah, I'm sure this is common knowledge at this point for most sprite animators, but this is a huge deal for me. (Don't worry, animators, I'm not going to go blabbing to everyone how to do it in this post).

I was actually messing around with some Mortal Kombat sprites a while ago for a now defunct project when I made a mistake. I didn't think much about it at the time, as I was still learning the program, and just deleted it. I don't know what made me think about it today as I'm sitting here working on the Game Ranger 3, but I decided to open up a new project file and test my theory. Well, it worked and my reaction was, "No fucking way..."

Not only will this allow the viewer to pause the animation, but it's going to allow me the ability to see where exactly a sprite is on the screen at any point instead of having to go forward to the point in the time line, click into the movie clip, mark where the sprite is on the screen, click out of it, then click into the movie clip of the other portion and make the adjustments.

Now, I never claimed to be doing things the easy way in my animations, so laugh if you want. I always knew there was an easier way of doing things, but I just couldn't figure it out. I don't have any kind of training or education with the program outside of what I have figured out on my own. I don't even use other websites to learn how to do things, unless I need a specific script...which has been about twice.

What does this mean for the viewer besides being able to pause the animation? Well...I can make better menu selections and give the viewer the ability to skip to more precise locations within the animation...this includes making a button to pause the animation in the current frame, skip back/forward next scene and/or skip back/forward ten frames.

Now, for the "bad" news. This will not be in the current Game Ranger animation, as it will cost MORE TIME for me since I would have to once again redo the scenes...and that's just not going to happen. I will, however, still have the scene selection and forward/back scene select during the animation.

In both the next Game Ranger and other animations I will put all the neat little things in. I'm rather excited about it.

High-Def End of Time (Game Ranger ) Poster