GIMP actually has an animate feature of sorts. In the synaptic manager, look-up gimp-gap, which adds a video menu to the image frame.

I haven't toyed much with the feature, but it could be helpful.

As for animated gifs, I've seen quite a bit of animated avatars on DA, so it shouldn't be a problem.

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I love humanity with all my heart. I just wish it dead from time to time.
Stupidity is the true power of evil.

Ok, that makes sense and looks useful in principle. It seems one of those elements only accessible in Ubuntu, but I am glad that I didn't find a gaping weakness in my favorite graphics program.

It should be available under other OSes, but I've noticed GIMP isn't as powerful in Windows than it is in Ubuntu.

There's also a couple of useful tutorials for GIMP. If anything, there's always Cinepaint, which is a fork of the GIMP but made specifically for animation. It was availabe in the Ubuntu repositories, but was taken out, likely because the of the integration of the GIMP Animation Package into the GIMP. Or maybe that's just for Ubuntu Studio.

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I love humanity with all my heart. I just wish it dead from time to time.
Stupidity is the true power of evil.

I had thought for a while that The Gimp was equally powerful in both OS's with the exception of scripting, but alas I was wrong. Thanks for the info.

BTW, have you seen/played spore? If not, I recommend for the design principles alone.

I've seen the Will Wright presentation from a few years back (the 30 minute one), and it looked very interesting, and I'm not surprised the finished product didn't live up to the hype, but I'm not sure if I want to pick it up. It's design principles on a whole are amazing (at least, the way Wright explained it), but whether I'm actually tempted to play it is an entirely different matter.

Oh, and for GIMP, there's two reasons it's not quite as powerful:
1) The main dev team doesn't compile the Windows installer (and I think it's the same for Blender), and it doesn't always get updated at the same time as us Linux users.
2) Graphic pads make it crash. Don't ask why, it just does.

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I love humanity with all my heart. I just wish it dead from time to time.
Stupidity is the true power of evil.

The creature creator is free and you would probably get more enjoyment out of that then the game proper. From an computer animation pov it's great. The programming of the game itself sucks horribly, but the creature generation is excellent.

Please tell me that you are referring to graphic pads making it crash in windows only. I am planning on getting a tablet and would like it to work in the GIMP if at all possible.

It crashes in windows only. It's (overall) balls blazingly fantastic in Ubuntu.

Incidentally, have you tried Grokking the GIMP? It's a tutorial book of sorts found in the Synaptic Package Manager. I haven't checked it, but it could be a good read.

Also, GIMP 2.6 is neat.

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I love humanity with all my heart. I just wish it dead from time to time.
Stupidity is the true power of evil.

Dude, their released 2.6? Awesome. I will need to login to my Ubuntu installation and too the upgrade in addition to setting up GAP there. I haven't used grokking the gimp to the best of my recollection, but I might do so in the future. Gods, I need to eventually do some scripting.

Damnit, how do you upgrade to 2.6.0? I tried to Aptget but it didn't upgrade me past 2.4.6.