GifCat -- Write GIFs in LOVE.

[WetDesertRock]

Hello all!

I have finally gotten around to releasing my GIF writing lib for LOVE 0.10.x, which I hope should be pretty easy to drop into your projects. One advantage this project has is that it is threaded (as much as possible), so it can save your gifs while you play with a minimal performance hit (even less if you give it a canvas rather than a screenshot).

1466962294.gif (413.36 KiB) Viewed 12138 times

Here is some code with all of the important bits cut out so you can see the basic API:

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-- In love.load()
gifcat.init()

-- In love.update()
gifcat.update(dt)

-- In love.quit()
gifcat.close()

-- Start recording:
curgif = gifcat.newGif(os.time()..".gif",100,100)

-- Write frame:
curgif:frame(love.graphics.newScreenshot())

-- Stop recording:
curgif:close()

https://github.com/WetDesertRock/GifCat

[zorg]

Neat lib!

love.graphics.newScreenshot will impede performance no matter what, if called every frame; then again, this is good for "non-realtime" gif-renders, if one serializes all inputs and the game is deterministic; they can render replays to gifs to watch. (quality/filesize ratio might not be the best for that though)

[Trebgarta]

What about rendering to a canvas, and using that in both the screen and gifcat?

[zorg]

What about rendering to a canvas, and using that in both the screen and gifcat?

That may work better, didn't test it myself though, so can't say for certain.

[WetDesertRock]

What about rendering to a canvas, and using that in both the screen and gifcat?

Yes, it will. :frame will work with ImageData, Image, or Canvas. So honestly .newScreenshot is probably the slowest (but easiest to demonstrate).

[rmcode]

I wanted to implement the library into LoGiVi, but no matter what I do the .so file can't be found:

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lib/gifcat/gifcat.lua:188: module 'gifcatlib' not found:
	no field package.preload['gifcatlib']
	no 'gifcatlib' in LOVE game directories.
	no file 'gifcatlib.so' in LOVE paths.
	no file './gifcatlib.lua'
	no file '/usr/local/share/luajit-2.0.3/gifcatlib.lua'
	no file '/usr/local/share/lua/5.1/gifcatlib.lua'
	no file '/usr/local/share/lua/5.1/gifcatlib/init.lua'
	no file './gifcatlib.so'
	no file '/usr/local/lib/lua/5.1/gifcatlib.so'
	no file '/usr/local/lib/lua/5.1/loadall.so'

I tried:

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local GIFLIB = "lib.gifcat.gifcatlib"
local GIFLIB = "lib/gifcat/gifcatlib"
local GIFLIB = "lib.gifcat"
local GIFLIB = "lib/gifcat"
... and a few more

I also moved both files to the same folder as my main, but even there it doesn't seem to find them :S

I just pushed the feature branch to the repo, in case you want to have a direct look at how things are organized.

[WetDesertRock]

rmcode: I just pushed a fix. Please try it out, note that your GIFLIB should now look like: "lib/gifcat/gifcatlib.so"

[rmcode]

Cool! It works now

Is there a way to specify the delay between frames?

I tried it with frame:setFPS but that didn't seem to have the desired effect.

[WetDesertRock]

Without seeing your code I'll tell you this. It defaults it FPS to the current FPS when you are making a gif. However that FPS will most likely go down due to making a new gif. So I would suggest trying to pass a dt argument to the :frame function. Setting the FPS just interprets how fast the frames you are sending it are. So saying you are giving it 60 fps where in reality you are giving it 30 will result in a gif 2x as fast. The dt argument in :frame will make it a variable framerate, thus reacting to how fast the game is actually going.

[PixelPiledriver]

Yo, this looks awesome.
Would love to use it but I'm having some trouble.
Can't seem to build the library.
After a lot of different tries this is what I get.



Not sure what to do.
Can you help me?