Hi,

I try to find some "rules" in the frame ordering of building sprites.

Is the first frame always the standing frame? Which ones are the flyer frames? Which one the construction frames?

From which data could I see this?

regards
Andreas

The frame order is defined in iscript (.bin/.txt). There is no strict rule for which animation comes after which, though. Some sprites have the death animations put up front but in this case the initialization animation points to some other frames / framesets (for example, for ghosts the first frameset to be played is 3).

Open up iscript.bin found under scripts\ in the game archive (or better yet, decompile it to text) using PYICE and look at the desired animation.

Ok, thanks.

Could I also find out how many walking directions are possible for a units sprite?

It seems most units have 32 walking directions, but for e.g. protoss/wittness.grp it looks less (compared with marine.grp). I tried to find this in iscript.bin but didn't find it.

Every unit that turns has 32 directions. The GRP has 17 frames of rotation (from 0-180 degrees), and these are mirrored by the engine when facing the other direction. So for units that turn, every 17th frame is the next frame in that animation for that direction.


Ground units appear to have fewer directions in game because their GRPs duplicate each frame except for the 17th frame in a frameset. Taking the Marine as an example, if you decompile it you'll see marine000 and marine001 are identical, as are marine002 and marine003, etc. So in game they appear to have 9 directions.