About GAF

Introduction

GAF stands for Generic Animation Format. GAF is designed to store Flash animations in an open cross-platform format for further playback in a multitude of game development frameworks and devices. GAF enables artists and animators to use Flash CS for creating complex animations and seamlessly use them with various game development frameworks.

Benefits

GAF Converter analyzes the bytecode of each SWF file and creates a GAF file which provides the following benefits:

GAF Converter Features

Standalone application

GAF Converter is a standalone application that works directly from your Windows or Mac computer. Conversion of animations becomes even faster and more reliable.

Mask support

Feel free to animate and apply masks to static and animated objects. GAF supports simple rectangular masks that are applied to whole animations to achieve clipping.

gaf converter standalone application for 2d animations
flash 2d animation gaf mask support

Filters

GAF Converter supports Blur, Glow, Dropshadow and color transform filters. The tool also optimizes nonanimated filters and bakes them into the texture atlas.

No limitations on timeline

You can create animations with any internal structure and with any depth of nesting. During the conversion, animations are optimized and merged into a single time line.

gaf flash 2d animations filters converter
No limits on 2d animation timeline structure and nesting

Conversion of shape tweens

Easily use shape tweens for creating morph animations and other various visual effects. Shape tweens are converted into frame sequences for high performance playback.

Frame labels

Use frame labels to define different parts of animations such as game character movements. You can also access parts of your animations after conversion.

gaf supports shape tweens for creating 2d animations in unity
gaf frame labels sequences, create 2d animations

Optimized texture atlas

When the GAF Converter generates the texture atlas it also takes into account the scale value of symbols. Sprites are never saved larger than required for playback. Bitmap sprites are also optimized to support pixel perfect animations.

Binary config

GAF includes a highly compressed binary config describing each frame of the animation. Compression minimizes file size and the binary structure highly improves animation loading speed.

GAF converter optimized atlas to support perfect 2d animations for games
gaf binary config describing frame of the 2d animations

GAF Bundles

Multiple SWF animations can be converted into a single GAF Bundle (single texture atlas and multiple configs). The GAF conversion process will pack your animations and remove duplicate sprites across all animations thus saving file size and decreasing memory consumption.

Multi-resolution targeting

Run the GAF Converter just once and it will generate numerous atlases to support SD and HD resolutions as well as resolutions that support all Android screen resolutions.

gaf bundles convert swf animations into shared atlas
gaf multi resolution support

Expanded settings

The GAF Converter supports multiple settings to adjust the converted animation for particular size and resolution needs. For example, you can set up scales, CSFs, atlases sizes, etc.

One format for all frameworks

The GAF Converter exports animations to the Generic Animation Format for playback on all the frameworks.

gaf expanded settings to adjust the converted 2d animations
one format of 2d game animation for all frameworks on mobile

Playback Libraries

Once you have converted your animations into the GAF files, you will need to render those animations in your games. The GAF Runtimes are open source libraries (or plugins) that allow your game toolkit to load and render animations in your games.

The GAF Runtimes support full animations playback API that provides direct access to timeline, labels, and sprites. GAF Runtimes are built by game developers for game developers and are also used on our internal game projects.

The official runtimes are on GitHub (on open source basis) and in the Unity Asset Store.

Cocos2D-X Cocos2D Unity3d Starling

Development

GAF Platform is under active development by a large team of senior developers with extensive experience building games. We are constantly working on improving our converter and runtimes.

gaf free downloadgaf pricing

Cristobal Viedma
Cristobal Viedma, CEO of Monkimun
GAF is providing the best tool out there to import SWF animations into your game. We've been testing quite a few tools/plugins (even from really big companies) and they've overpass all of them. Not only their tools are great, but also the team behind it is super responsive and friendly.