[SOLVED][Question] How to create a simple background transition loop with 2 images?

[GammaBreak]

For my current visual novel project, my goal is to have a scene that involves a repetitive action. I essentially need 2 frames of animation, sort of a before/after state, and I am aiming for this to be its own separate scene/background, not character sprites.

I'm having a little trouble understanding how to transition back and forth between a scene as shown in the renpy tutorial. The code from the tutorial would work:

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image bg atl transitions:
    "bg washington"
    "bg whitehouse" with dissolve
    pause 1.0
    "bg washington" with dissolve
    pause 1.0
    repeat

Except I clearly don't understand how this functions, because every time I've tried to implement it, my game just skips this entire block. The parts I do understand are the pause lines and the repeat.

I declare two separate backgrounds in my script:

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image frame1= "images/bg frame1.png"
image frame2= "images/bg frame2.png"

Swapping out frame1/2 with "bg washington"/"bg whitehouse" doesn't work. I assume since these were strings that they are directly referencing image names, so I tried putting in my image names (bg frame1.png) into the quotes, and still nothing. Can someone assist me in understanding this?

[hell_oh_world]

if you've defined the images using the `image` statement then you can use them by putting the image names inside a set of quotes...

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image frame1 = "images/bg frame1.png"
image frame2 = "images/bg frame2.png"

image bg atl transitions:
    "frame1" with dissolve
    pause 1.0
    "frame2" with dissolve
    pause 1.0
    repeat

label start:
    scene bg atl transitions # should work iir
    pause
    return

screen something():
    add "bg atl transitions" # adding the images onto a screen, not related to the issue but shows that you need the image names inside quotes if they're defined using the `image` statement...

[GammaBreak]

Okay, I was being a colossal idiot and not realizing that the

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image bg atl transitions:
    "frame1" with dissolve
    pause 1.0
    "frame2" with dissolve
    pause 1.0
    repeat

was a definition not to be placed within the label. Now it's starting to click, thank you very much.

Follow up question: once I've got this animation going, is it possible to have the text/dialogue auto-advance after pauses? It's a very basic animation and I can closely match the timing, and I was hoping to just sync some dialogue to the pauses. Basically something like

show animation
"dialogue" pause 1.0
"dialogue" pause 1.0
...

[hell_oh_world]

maybe you can do something like this through the use of text tags `w` and `nw`...
https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/text.html#text-tag-nw
https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/text.html#text-tag-w

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label start:
  show animation
  "dialogue1{w=1.0}{nw}" # w=1.0 simply acts like a pause that waits until it reaches one second before reaching the nw tag which forces the dialogue to dismiss itself without clicking...
  "dialogue2{w=1.0}{nw}"

[GammaBreak]

Sounds interesting, will dig further. Thanks for the help!