Battle Nations Wiki administrators Bobmath and Drullkus created a program in Java called Animation Grabber, a tool that lets users on Mac OS X and Windows to view units and buildings, as well as their respective animations.
The results from this program have created a seismic impact on this wiki and possibly other Battle Nations communities.
Animation Grabber takes material sheets stored in .z2raw files and applies compositing data stored .bin files to the .z2raw files to create the unit and its animation. It then reads the BattleUnits.json file and sorts the collected units accordingly. It also reads the buildings as well and puts them into a different list sorted by the Compositions.json file.
Overview[]
The functionality of Animation Grabber includes:
- Viewing Units and Buildings, and their respective animations. It includes a toggle to show the damage at the max rank average damage on the field with another toggle to show the test dummy.
- Viewing the unprocessed list of animations available in the Game Files.
- Exporting the Units and their Animations into .gif files, .png files, or individual animation frames rendered in .png files. There are controls to change the size of the export.
- A playback bar with a pause button. Some units have little funny moments that simply cannot be missed.
- Changing the background of the unit, which also impacts the background of the export. The backgrounds include Battle Maps and plain colors. User can use custom images and custom colors as well.
- A way to export the .z2raw file into a .png file. This is what .z2raw will look like.
- You can edit these .png files and replace the normal .z2raw file with the modified .png file. This can be exploited to create humorous effects. Shh! Shh! The way to access this interface is a secret.
Usage[]
- See this article for help with using Animation Grabber.
History[]
The project began back in March 27 when Drullkus noticed that Bobmath's original Wikitext builder was not user-friendly. They resolved this by coding Animation Grabber in Java, a language that was simply easier to create user-friendly applications.
Running this program requires users to have Battle Nations installed. If the user instead plays Battle Nations on the iPhone and have downloaded the game assets to their computer, Animation Grabber is able to request an alternative file route from the user.
Someone could not stop with amusing himself with the thought of Lt. Morgan being dressed in pink bathrobes, and thus the feature of allowing material replacement was implemented. There is no intention of allowing these modified materials to be exported into .z2raw files.