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Comment by omneity | Hacker News Reader

Big AoE fan here. The idea is brilliant and I love the execution.

I wish the author did not put every screenshot in a gif, I'd have preferred to be able to look at the results in a less stressful way. 2 seconds to switch to another screenshot, that's way too fast!

On a side note, it would be interesting to try to apply the same technique to units and effects (explosions, fire, etc). I didn't see a mention of it by the author so I wonder if there's a technical limitation here that wasn't mentioned.

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There's a 13 year old open issue on the Firefox bug tracker that could address this by adding playback controls to animated GIFs[1].

I remember this every once in a while because Dan's replies are great.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=560084

Ah yes, classic bugzilla.

"Hey could we do <thing> that would make <other thing> so much easier and solve <problem>?"

"Closed as wontfix."

Ticket is open, so go ahead and implement to your desire.

I get that it's open source and all that, but sometimes one just feels like strolling down to Mozilla HQ and saying "What exactly would you say you do here?" Like people are being paid to work on this thing, they have $400M in revenue. But yeah I'm still mostly in the Chromium camp myself and couldn't care less.

Could be worse, wouldn't be the first time some minor change or bugfix breaks some power user feature and instead of fixing it properly they just close it as wontfix.

Usually this pattern repeats a few times until all workarounds are gone as well.

I have a stupid dirty trick for this (works in Safari) - click and start dragging the image, but don't let go. It's like you drag a particular "frame" out and can look at it.

20 years on a mac and I'm still learning stuff, thank you!

Just FYI: that old trick is definitely not a mac or Safari thing

I think Opera was the first to do that.

hey, author here, thanks for the note about the GIFs. If you go to the website (https://engine.study/sprite-diffuser/) you can select the themes from a dropdown to see each one.

Units are going to be difficult, villagers are something like 10 pixels across - getting them to pose correctly will be hard. However, there is someone doing something similar with the original Mortal Kombat sprites who is having a lot of success -

https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/13jllfh/qu...

Unfortunately the website is not currently usable, it's on a fixed loop.

If you pick one of the dropdowns it will stop looping.

I noticed that there are some gaps in some of the models, specifically around the future and roman ones.

I must have missed the link to the website. The preview demo is pretty neat!

> Units are going to be difficult, villagers are something like 10 pixels across

Could it possibly help to upscale units, apply reskinning, and then downscale them back?

The Mortal Kombat WIP is super interesting, thank you for linking to it! I’m wondering which techniques are used to keep the rendering stable cross-frame.

Am I imagining things or once-upon-a-time did Firefox give you the ability to advance GIFs frame by frame?

Pressing Esc did stop the animation, but I'm not sure you could step over it.

In the past you could freeze them and step through frames by right-clicking the image, but I can't remember which browser it was in. It was over a decade ago iirc.

I thought this was a feature for a while because image hosting sites like Imgur convert animated GIFs into videos because the compression is better, and you can adjust the playback. Some of them will even keep '.gif' in the URL despite serving you a video instead.

This is particularly infuriating when you're trying to use google image search to find a gif to embed in an html frame that doesn't accept videos and all you get are gifs that turn out to be videos.

Yup, and the titular GIPHY doesn't even embed GIFs.

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