Comment 43 for bug 1121982

I've implemented the new format in src/animation.cc in my own branch, and converted various barbarian workers to the new format - things seem to be working well so far.

My todo list is, roughly in order:
1) Get some minor quirks of the conversion script that prevents automatic conversion of some workers figured out
2) Hook up your region-based decomposition for buildings
3) Convert the rest of buildings and workers and world objects.
4) Work through remaining "NOCOM" comments and clean up the Python code a bit
5) Improve the spritemap packing algorithm and get the in-place modification / re-optimization of things working better

I think a first merge to trunk should be possible at point 4.

One more question though: I noticed that the spritemap branch loads all animations directly during loading again, rather than delaying loading until an animation is actually blitted for the first time. Was this intentional, or is this just a temporary artefact of the refactoring?