What is a storyboard?
A storyboard is a picture containing all the frames that make an animation.
The storyboard contains 8 lines, one for each orientation. The orientation are, from top to bottom, South-West (SW), South (S), South-East (SE), East (E), North-East (NE), North (N), North-West (NW), West (W).
The storyboard contains as many columns as they are frames in the animation. This varies from animation ton animation.
In the game, Civilization III will play all the frames of a given direction successively. For some anomation, like death, the series is played only once. For other animations, like attack or run, the series can be played several times, "looping". To get a nice effect, the last frame should be similar enough to the first frame, so the animation can loop smootlhy.
FLICSTER can be used to produce a new storyboard (pcx format) from the FLC (format used by Civilization III for the unit animation). FLICSTER can also produce a Civilization III animation FLC from a pcx storyboard.
SBB can be used to combine several storyboard into a new one, or to produce a new storyboard from several bmp files (one file for each frame).
In a storyboard, the size of every frame is constant, and the number of frames for every direction is also constant.