GIF does not animate in runtime, only first frame shown (C2 GIFs animated in runtime)

[MikalDev]

Problem description

GIFs on sprite do no animate during runtime.

Attach a .c3p

GIFFail.zip

A minimal Construct 3 project (.c3p) is required to be attached. Please see the guidelines

Steps to reproduce

1. Load *.c3p, run

Observed result

GIF does not animate.

Expected result

GIF animated as it does in C2

Affected browsers

• Chrome: yes
• Firefox: NA
• Edge: NA
• Safari: NA

System details

Windows 10, Chrome

[NetOneGames]

Did you import animation from (gif) file? I ask as there is no animation in your example. you cant just add a gif as sprite you need to import it

[MikalDev]

I imported GIF into sprite animation (import file from animation mode)

[NetOneGames]

OK, strange, there are no animation frames in your example so there is nothing for construct to animate. Which indicates that the import didn't work. Not that the animation isn't playing.

[shortercode]

I'm not in the office today, but thought I'd chime in. I believe this has come up before, and the outcome was that there's no method for extracting animations from GIF files in the web browser. So short of writing a GIF decoder ( a lot of complex code with weird edge cases ) there wasn't much that could be done.

So tl;dr GIF files are treated as a static image.

[NetOneGames]

Oh yea youre right I tried it on my phone.
Import animation as gif doesn't work,
it either gives you a single image or a blank file.

That's a bit pants,
I used that feature a lot in C2. :(

[shortercode]

I can't find any related issue to it, so maybe it never made it as far as github or I could just be making it up.

I'll mark it as a C2 parity bug and will discuss it with the others when I'm back in the office. @AshleyScirra might chime in when he has a chance, he might remember better.

[AshleyScirra]

The project only has one frame in the sprite which is why it doesn't animate. Unfortunately C3 can only import the first frame of a .gif, because browsers don't provide the necessary APIs to split apart their frames. It should be straightforward to find a tool to extract a gif to a sequence or strip of PNG images, which can be imported to C3.

GIF is an ancient format now and is already falling out of use - often on the web today when you see an animated image labelled "gif", it's really an MPEG-4 or WebM video, because GIF has poor compression ratios. APNG is a more modern equivalent, but we're still missing the browser APIs to read them. File a feature request here if you really want support for importing animated image formats: https://construct3.ideas.aha.io/
If it proves to be a popular feature we could look in to setting up custom image decoders, but this would be a lot of work for what I think is a fairly niche feature, and it should be straightforward to use PNG image sequences instead.

[MikalDev]

Ok, will file enhancement request. Likely not GIF, but animated texture / sprite (e.g. WebM), native playback (not decompose to sprites, which blows up memory.)

[castpixel]

make gif import happen, this is terrible