Shivan Hunter wrote:There are a few animation artifacts here (some pixels change even when they're not part of the rings- look on the left side), but I don't think they're on the final jpg/bmp. It seems like they're products of the conversion to GIF format.
GIFs don't do partial transparency, so if you are using anti-aliasing make sure it's using a black background, but that also means you'll be able to notice the jagged aliasing border if the graphic is used where the game background lightens from proximity to a star or when overlapping other bright images like planets. Most of the pixel changes I'm seeing look like they are due to variations in the anti-aliasing used with your green-screen techniques along with the crude palleting inherent in the GIF format.
The remaining unneeded pixel changes may be due to differences in the color pallet between different frames, especially if you are using JPGs which inherently do a lot of averaging between adjacent pixels. If you must use an intermediary format, I'd suggest PNGs, and their ability to have partial transparency is great for anti-aliasing in static sprites, without having to worry about what background colors may be involved.
After a lot of staring I'm pretty sure the frame that has all the noticeable differences in the green-screen aliasing is the one with all the rings aligned in the same plane (and one duplicated frame for looping completion). The other frames have more visible details near your green-glowing-sphere thingies but in that one frame the background details look like they were cut out more than the others.
If you are using GIMP to stitch together a series of static images, make sure you unify the color pallet across all of your frames, as GIFs do not have a true RBG mode, but GIMP+GIF can save a different pallet for every frame. When you have all the frames attached to the image, switch GIMP's color depth mode to Indexed for more accuracy in the animGIF previews (always save as... a backup file in the native GIMP file format before screwing around with stuff like color depth mode or color indexes
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