Dear gamedev.net-community!

I'm looking for the right technology in order to work with animated GIFs.

What language/framework would be good to manage the following things in an effienct way (time-spent wise):

- Only needs to be a console application

- Should be able to create a new animated GIF by using multiple other already existing GIFs

- Should be able to create all frames of a new GIF and also be able to set the ms delay

- Needs to be able to read frame-count and frame-delay of GIFs

- It would be sweet, if this all can be cross-platform; however Windows support is required

I thought about using C# / Mono for this. Are there any good resources to read about this? Tutorials about handling GIFs in this scope?

Are there better languages that are maybe solely made for these kind of things?

Thanks for reading my thread! Looking forward for your replies.

Since you are talking about C#, the Framework contains a GifBitmapEncoder class that lets you store all your frames. Plenty of tutorials show up on Google so I won't link to any in particular.

I don't know if they have incorporated that into Mono's version of the Framework. If so, that could be your answer.

If Mono didn't incorporate that class, perhaps look in to ImageMagick.

Thanks, Frob! However, I encountered another problem.

I have a problem, I cannot create an animated GIF, only a simple one-frame GIF.

It seems like I would have to use NGIF (http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/11505/NGif-Animated-GIF-Encoder-for-NET), but I would rather not use any other external libraries/components.

Is this simply a limit with C#? Are there any other languages that provide more native support in terms of GIF creation?

Last but not least, thanks for pointing out, Nik02, but I'm quite aware of that : )

Is this simply a limit with C#? Are there any other languages that provide more native support in terms of GIF creation?

Creating graphical image files is not part of any language. Some systems provide image manipulation libraries -- which are typically not part of the language but are instead part of a library.

The GifBitmapEncoder mentioned above is quite capable of generating multi-frame images, assuming you are using it correctly. I imagine the NGif library you linked to also is capable of doing it when used correctly.

Check your documentation, step through the process carefully to ensure you are doing exactly what you are supposed to be doing. You need to make sure your palettes are correct and your image data is correct, and that you compose each image correctly, advance to the next correctly, and otherwise do all the steps required by the library.