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- FR 101 -- A quick'n'dirty colortest animation.
- ANIM Op5 - about 440 frames - meant to be played back at 15fps - resolution
- of 640x400, with 16 colors, though only 7 or 8 of them are used ....
- dunno why. On my A3000, this plays back much smoother in Anim7 format,
- depending on your CPU, you might want to convert it. I'm not distributing
- it this way because a) it's smaller as anim5 b) Not everyone has the tools
- for Anim7 playback, and c) It might not be faster on other Amigas.
-
-
- Details:
- This originated as a two-player FDPro (*1) game, recorded of course,
- with the FR (*2). Three Imagine files were made (*3), destaged
- with ISL (*4) and combined in a text editor. The results were
- restaged and thrown at Imagine 2.0. The Arch object and a ground-
- plane was placed properly, the colors for the sky set, some light
- added, and every other frame (hence the 15fps) rendered in
- "Color-Shade" mode.
-
- *1 - Fighter Duel Pro, a 2 player head-to-head WWII aircraft combat
- simulator. Duelling was done over 2400 baud modem. The plane
- flown was the Spitfire Mk.IV (chosen randomly - I swear!)
-
- *2 - Flight Recorder, lets you save your flights to disk, and use the
- resulting 3D paths in several Amiga 3D-animation packages.
-
- *3 - Three binary Imagine staging files.
- #1- First pilot's path, me, the plane in the foreground.
- #2- Second pilot's path, Eric Penn, the victim (sorry!)
- #3- The camera's path, which was made from the first pilot's
- path, offset by 4 frames.
- These paths were created at 30fps resolution, but rendered
- for 15fps playback, to speed rendering and save space.
-
- *4 - ISL, the Imagine Staging Language by John T. Grieggs.
- Basically, ISL converts the Imagine "staging" files, the files
- where Imagine stores all of it's keyframe animation info, into
- a human-readable form (ASCII). In this case, the text files
- were manipulated by-hand in a text editor to cut and paste the
- three FR-generated paths into a single staging file. It was
- easier than it sounds! ISL was used in the creation of the
- FDPro Flight Recorder, so I'm told. I wish they'd left in the
- option to save directly to ISL.
-
-
- Flight Notes:
- At one point in this Duel, I pulled back too hard and went into
- a high-speed stall. This is where Eric was zooming above the
- Arch, I was trying to follow. This caused my plane to do that
- little wing-dip and the view to rotate. This is not an error in
- the Flight Recorder, nor in Imagine, this is accurate. It's
- very ugly though, isn't it? I hate when I do that!
-
- What you see here is the second phase of this Duel. During the
- first part, I made a nice easy loop while Eric turned around
- hard. Then Eric executed a half-roll and climbed again - this
- was dumb, I should know, I used to do it all the time. Eric lost
- a lot of speed while I did a wide lo-yoyo and came up, closing on
- Eric fast and loosing a little lead. This is where the animation
- begins. Eric has rounded his second loop and I am above him
- coming down. He pretty much didn't have a chance at this point.
- Although, after we had dove under the arch, I was using full flaps
- to keep inside of his turn. He then zoomed, which could have been
- a good move if he had kept climbing. Instead he started rolling
- wildly, jinking my fire. What he probably didn't know was that
- I was about to poop out, having spent all my energy on my last
- maneuver in order to take my shot. He went over the top and
- dove again, which allowed me to regain speed in the dive.
- Splash one. The point where Eric's plane disappears in the anim
- is where I got the kill.
-
-
- Next up for the animation:
- Insert "real" Spitfire objects, make a suitable background (whizzing under
- the Golden Gate Bridge would be nice!), adjust lighting, and render at full
- quality. Shouldn't be more than 500 megabytes when it's finished.... look
- for it on nets everywhere... or maybe not.
-
- --
- Lt. Jeff "Blackjack" Walkup - INTERNET: jwalkup@sfsuvax1.sfsu.edu
-
- Eric Penn can be reached on GEnie as "STUPID", or stupid@genie.geis.com
-
- Mega-thanks to John T. Grieggs for ISL. Take a bow! If you use Imagine
- at all, you -=NEED=- ISL!
-
- (C)opywrong 1993, No rights reserved, never, no how, nowheres. HAVE FUN!
-
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