Last night I spent the better part of 5 hours finishing up an animation I had been tinkering with for what is probably the culmination of at least 30 man-hours of work over the course of several days--all for a project I have spent the better part of 3 years working on. Although I have experienced my share of problems, I tend to grit my teeth and accept there are some things I can't accomplish using the Nova engine, and after testing my ideas, I usually come to a compromise, or abandon ideas all together.

Now, I have created quite possibly thousands of sprites over the years for EVN--ships, weapons, animated spobs--all for the various projects I've worked on--all of which I've had trouble with, but only when I've tried doing something out of the ordinary. Generally speaking, when I create an animation, I have an expectation, and it is a very reasonable expectation at that--I expect my animation to play the freaking frames in order, or at the very least, play them in a way I specify provided I follow certain guidelines.

Not so with the Main Menu animation. After working tirelessly last night until 3AM this morning, I was filled with a calm feeling of accomplishment. After viewing my animation spin play successfully in Novatools, I started up Nova to make sure the animation fit in seamlessly with the Main Menu which I had completed months before--it did. However, the frames played in completely random order. I experienced a spark of anger, but decided to do some testing to make sure my conclusions were solid. Perhaps I had too many frames in the animation (22), or maybe Nova didn't like the size--the only way to see if I was right was to see if the stock Nova animation played in random order too. After a quick test confirmed that, I spent the following hour trying to collect my thoughts in a rather expletive filled post that I was going to post last night--but refrained from doing for decency's sake (plus, the prospect of being banned wasn't that attractive.)

Now, I have noticed that other people have had trouble with this problem (such as UncleTwitchy). My question is simply this: is there any way to make the frames play in order?!

Although I would like some absolution with this, I fear I won't get any...

Thank you for your time,

-Verb

No, there is no way at all to make them play in any order. I think that everyone has tried.

You may be able to use the button sliding animations instead. Unless you want it to loop.

Yeah, the 'staticy' effect of random frames is kinda hard coded into the engine there. Sorry mate.

I posted a topic about this about two years ago or so (maybe as recently as a year and a half ago) when I was trying to do a planet rotation on the Main Menu screen of SFA. I ended up doing random flashes of the little lights below the view screen. The randomness is hardwired into Nova.

Yeah, it sucks, I know. Sorry.