Animated GIF support / Animated tokens (Hear me out!)

Okay, this is going to sound a little odd, but I think support for animated tokens - perhaps most easily in animated GIF form - would be a huge asset. I tried importing some animated GIFs of sprites from games, kind of bouncing in place in their fighting stances for something of a "Final Fantasy Tactics" feel, which would make it really easy to pick out active tokens, but alas, they did not animate. I don't know how Roll20 implements images, so I don't know if directly supporting animated GIFs is feasible, but I think support for animated tokens would be a good idea. Not only could they be used for player characters, but for environmental features, like filckering torch flames or subtly glowing cave mushrooms. If you could make some system of sequencing alpha channel PNGs together in an animation, I imagine things like glowing auras and animated spell effects would add a lot of zazz. I think even if they were tricky to implement and even a bit proprietary, animated tokens would fetch a hefty price on the theoretical asset market. I think there are lots of DMs who would like to place a shimmering, crackling arcane summoning circle in the middle of their climactic encounter to stop the evil archmage from summoning horrors from beyond the reckoning of mortals.

I think this is a great idea. I play a pokemon table top game and who wouldn't want this <a href="http://www.pokemonelite2000.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/001.gif" rel="nofollow">http://www.pokemonelite2000.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/001.gif</a> as their token?

Bump; since I was just about to post the same thing. Upon researching though, HTML5 doesnt support anim. gifs but it does support spritesheets. So you'd need a tool (there are some out there) that'll break apart the gif frames and into a spritesheet. Then code roll20 to handle it from there.

I actually think it might be a good idea to consolidate this concept with the other suggestion of multi-"sided" tokens - the ability to have more than one image assigned to a token could easily be extended to include animating them. Under where you enter multiple images, you could just include a checkbox that says "animated" and a numeric field for animation speed, and it could cycle through the available "sides" at that speed.

thats a bummer that animated gifs aren't supported by html5. I'd caution against the multi-image tokens idea, because part of the point of roll20 is to have quick setup. The act of googling a token image and slapping it on the map is supposed to be that simple to prep on the fly. That goes out the window if the GM has to prep multiple images for the token, pretty much ahead of time. Whereas, animated GIFs solve the problem because the act of googling Fire Elemental would bring up valid images with flickering flames right there, and the GM just chooses it and the animate happens automatically.

Bump; since I was just about to post the same thing. Upon researching though, HTML5 doesnt support anim. gifs but it does support spritesheets. So you'd need a tool (there are some out there) that'll break apart the gif frames and into a spritesheet. Then code roll20 to handle it from there. This isn't working for my sprite sheets.