Issues with GraphicsGale...

[pixelsforhire]

GraphicsGale has been acting kinda weird on me. I made an animation and for some reason, the frames leave "trails" on my transparent pixels... to clarify, look at this sprite of The Tick I made:



Ok, he SHOULD be wiggling his antenae twice, pausing, then winking. As you can see, his antenae are surrounded by the spillover of the other frames (mostly the black outline.) I tried fixing it, but it just saves it back that way. When editing the sprite, it looks normal execpt in the preview window, where it looks like what you see above. Also, if I hover my pen tool over a transparent sprite, it draws that pixel in the preview window. After a short while, the window is filled with random pixels where there should be transparency. Luckily this doesn't translate into the saved gif.

I don't know what could be wrong. Its 100% legit, full version, no modding. Anyone else had this problem? More importantly, does anyone else know how to fix it?

Oh... and I noticed just now that IT ISN'T EVEN LOOPING!!! I can't complain to the makers, cause they don't speak English... I'm really getting pissed...

[Sherman Gill]

Random pixels where there should be transparency is something I've seen. I think I fixed it by zooming in/out.
As for your animation being screwed up... No idea.

[pkmays]

This is a result of GIFs having multiple algorithms for animation display. I believe your sprite has somehow been set to use the "no disposal" drawing method, which draws GIFs faster, but doesn't clear the image after each frame. This isn't a problem if the image is completely opaque, as the frame will be redrawn anyway, but if transparency is involved, weird things start to happen. 15 years ago, this might have kept a large complex animation from stuttering on a computer, but nowadays computers are fast enough to deal with clearing the image everyframe, so the setting is of limited use today.

No disposal


Background


To set the frames to the right drawing method, click the ellipses in the frame palette. Check the "All Frames" option and set the disposal to "Background." This should fix the GIF.





To make the image loop indefinitely, check the "Loop" option when saving to GIF, and set 0 for the number of loops.



Oh, always make sure to save a "master file" in GraphicsGale's .GAL format. If the GIF gets clobbered (like it did) you'll always have the original, which isn't affected by disposal settings.

[pixelsforhire]

Ok, wow. Thank you so much. I don't know how I managed to mess up two things I don't know about on the same file, but at least it won't happen again. As long as I have people's attention, is it possible to save custom palettes on Gale? The help file wasn't much, well, help. I'd like to be able to quickly apply palettes to several images for the same project or start a new image for that project and already have the palette right there.

Oh, and here's how that gif SHOULD have looked:

[Sherman Gill]

First, set the color depth to 8bit or less, define your custom pallete, then hit save pallete. When you need to use it/apply it again, just go to load pallete and well.. load it.

[pixelsforhire]

Thanks, everyone. You've been a ton of help. Oh, and I couldn't find a button or menu option for "save palette," but I could find a hotkey item. Apparently you can also hotkey "make me a sandwich." I'll never leave my computer again!

[Cow]

It's in the palette menu thing, on the palette window thing. The downwards facing black arrow... thing. 

[pixelsforhire]

Just a quick update for other people using Gale: I think I know why it pulled all that on me. It seems if you save a single frame gif it will change both of those options automatically. I wanted to warn other users so they don't save a single frame with the intent of animating later (like I did.)