Anim3D    1.4    Plays anims written in special language

Anim3D is my first Amiga program longer than a few dozen lines of code and
was mainly to teach myself how to program a 'real' application for the Amiga.
Basically it plays vector movies that are written in a special programming
language that I designed.

The original idea was:
"Wouldn't it be neat if vector demos could be created and played using a
standard program, use the screenmode that you wanted, were smoother on
faster machines and multitasked properly?"
After all, we can't impress PC users from fast animation 'cos they have
faster processors, but we can beat them by making something totally
impossible through Windows   ;-)

Anim3D is a real-time vector movie player for Workbench 3 machines. It has
three main features which I think most Amiga software (and demos) should
have nowadays:


1)  It is extremely friendly to the OS and multitasks properly; I've
    played animations whilst downloading files on the modem and been
    playing a tracker module so I think I can safely say this  :-)

2)  Animations are played at the SAME speed whatever the machine is...
    slower machines just have a lower frame update rate. This works fine
    because the display is double-buffered (as you'd expect) so there are
    no half drawn screens to be seen.

3)  It can use any of the display modes available on the machine;
    the same image is displayed on the screen whatever the resolution.
    This allows those lucky A4000/040 owners to display anims in mega hi-res
    while running at the same frame rate that an A1200 might run in lo-res.

It also makes use of a special dithering method that I worked out which
gives the appearance of more shades of each colour without slowing screen
rendering down. This does however require more chip memory than normal.

I have designed a language for creating these animations and some simple
demo anims have been included to give you an idea of what it can do. Take a
look at the animation files by all means (they are only ASCII text), but I
wouldn't try writing your own without any documentation!

Author: Michael George
Path: gfx/Anim3D-1.4.lha