Wired Movies and Sprites

Sprites and the Sprite Toolbox

This section introduces you to the terminology used to define sprites and describes the characteristics that govern the creation of sprite animation in an application.

If you're writing an application that uses sprite animation outside of a QuickTime movie, you use the routines available to you in the sprite toolbox. If your application is designed to work with QuickTime movies, you can take advantage of the routines available to you in the sprite media handler, which is discussed in Chapter 2, "The Sprite Media Handler."

The sprite toolbox is a set of data types and functions you can use to add sprite-based animation to an application. The sprite toolbox handles invalidating appropriate areas as sprite properties change, the composition of sprites and their background on an offscreen buffer, and the transfer of the result to the screen or to an alternate destination.