Background gifs

Is there anyway to put a gif onto the 'Map & Background' area of a map and still have it work?

Nope.

Sorry, Roll20 does not support animated GIFs. It would be nice to add a crackling campfire, or a bit of sparkle to a stream.

Even non-animated GIFs are sometimes problematic. Best to stick to JPG (with a .jpg file extension, not .jpeg) and PNG.

You can achieve some rudimentary animation with the API (Pro Subscriber Perk) by swapping images on a token on some interval.  

Dang, wanted to do rolling desert terrain as my group drives a cartload of water away from goblin raiders. That way the gif gives the idea of foreword movement w/o needing to make one long-ass map. Thanks anyways, folks!

I did a crude approximation of forward movement animation by flipping the tile horizontal and having a reference object (boulder) move in the opposite direction of the party. Every time I moved the boulder, I flipped the tile.

Oooo, good idea, Doug! Simple yet effective

Doug E. said: I did a crude approximation of forward movement animation by flipping the tile horizontal and having a reference object (boulder) move in the opposite direction of the party. Every time I moved the boulder, I flipped the tile. This sounds like an excellent idea for an API script. You could designate a number of objects on the map layer, and a distance and direction for them to travel each round or upon execution of a chat command. If they go off one side of the map, they reappear on the opposite side. Now all I have to do is learn javascript. I'll be back in a couple of months!

The Aaron said: You can achieve some rudimentary animation with the API (Pro Subscriber Perk) by swapping images on a token on some interval.   This.  I use the Torch API to animate fires, torches and such. You can just nick the code that does the image interval part for other "images". 

keithcurtis said: Doug E. said: I did a crude approximation of forward movement animation by flipping the tile horizontal and having a reference object (boulder) move in the opposite direction of the party. Every time I moved the boulder, I flipped the tile. This sounds like an excellent idea for an API script. You could designate a number of objects on the map layer, and a distance and direction for them to travel each round or upon execution of a chat command. If they go off one side of the map, they reappear on the opposite side. Now all I have to do is learn javascript. I'll be back in a couple of months! Well, there is Tokenmod which can be used to move selected tokens. Also, Slide Tokens but they leave a trail. Also, also, Marching order so you move one and the rest in the group follow. I have only ever used Tokenmod to move tokens so I can't vouch for the others. Also, don't know what happens if goes beyond map edge.

Going beyond the map edge just leaves it out where it can't be seen.   It wouldn't be too difficult to write a script that just moved things at some event.  I just finished a session with a bunch of invisible zones (clear objects with auras on the GM layer) which I'd written a script to move their radius in a random direction when a hidden turn came up in the turn order.

Here is a cool Waypoint Patrol script that can be used to "move the boulder" as described in the suggestion from Sparkus C., above. <a href="https://app.roll20.net/forum/post/2991336/slug%7D" rel="nofollow">https://app.roll20.net/forum/post/2991336/slug%7D</a> This can be used to animate the boulder or some background trees for the illusion of continual movement.