Animated Gifs?

[Full Bleed]

It's been awhile since I've seen this subject come up...

Any chance MT could add support for animated Gifs?

I found a couple threads on using animated gifs in swing:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2935 ... imated-gif

http://alvinalexander.com/blog/post/jfc ... pplication

Would that apply to MT in any regard?


I suspect that there are areas people would like to, potentially, use animated gifs:

1) States
2) Tokens/Objects
3) Frames/Dialogs
4) Chat window


I'd love to be able to add animated states to tokens... In particular an animated "has initiative" state. MT is so static... it could use a little motion here and there.

[JamzTheMan]

A campfire would be cool. I know I tried to add this at one time and it blew up MT...can't remember why.

[Full Bleed]

A campfire would be cool. I know I tried to add this at one time and it blew up MT...can't remember why.

I suspect much of the difficulty might lay in where it's attempted to be added.

Someone built a mod a while ago that supported animated emoticons that were local or web-based... But that looks to be a specific workaround, not the method suggested in the links I posted in the OP.

[xavram]

Animated water for a pool or fountain would be so cool....there's so many little details that could really bring a map to life, with just some minor motion.

[JamzTheMan]

I think the problem lies in that the "map" is probably not running on the AWT thread like the rest of the GUI. When you add an animated GIF to, say, a button on the UI, that thread updates the gif. So for MT it stays static and would require some thread magic to make sure it renders in the background.

We're looking to move to FX sometime in the future so I'd put this request on hold until then...