Originally posted by karajorma
Can you use effs in CB anims now? I seem to remember that you couldn't when they first came out.
Nope, still can't use them for that. That's a different part of the code and those anis need better control that an EFF can provide, by design. EFF was setup to make creating/using effects easier and be optimized to take up less memory. EFFs let you use whatever format you want for the frames (as long as they are all the same format) so that you can choose the format which works best with what you want to show. You can have JPG for non-power-of-2 images and low disk space usage, TGA for best quality (but also most memory), or the various DDS formats where you can choose the quality vs. memory.
There will be a new format which can replace a standard ANI used for briefings, mainhall anims, talking heads, intel data, etc. It will use JPG for the frames and all be contained in a single file like ANI is now. Every one of these new files will be created to take full advantage of the animation system and be able to play forwards, backwards and ping-pong. Only some ANIs can actually do that now. It will only use JPG for the frames because it's the only format which satisfies all of the requirements. Those requirements being: non-power-of-2 sized frames, low disk space usage, quicker to download (smaller), variable compression to pick the best quality/size ratio to fit the animation. Compression rates are also frame independant so you can have some frames that are highly compressed and other frames that have hardly any compression to get the best quality.
Work on that was put on hold a couple of months ago since I needed time to work on other stuff. Shortly after 3.6.7 gets released though I'll go back and finish up the code. Hopefully this new format will work out for everyone.
