Programming With QuickTime Sprites
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This chapter introduces you to the fundamentals of sprite animation and the sprite toolbox. Sprites were new to QuickTime 2.5 and have since been enhanced in QuickTime 3.
This chapter discusses the ways in which sprite animation differs from traditional video animation. The metaphor of a sprite animation as a theatrical play is used, in which sprite tracks are characterized as the boundaries of the stage and a sprite world as the stage itself. To extend the metaphor, you may want to think of sprites as actors performing on that stage.
Each sprite has properties that describe its location and appearance at a given time. During an animation sequence, the application modifies the sprite's properties to cause it to change its appearance and move around the screen. Sprites may be mixed with still-image graphics to produce a wide variety of effects while using relatively little memory.
A sprite world is a graphics world for a sprite animation. To create a sprite animation in an application but outside a movie, you must first create a sprite world. (You do not need to create a sprite world to create a sprite track in a QuickTime movie.) Once you have created a sprite world, you create sprites associated with that sprite world. You can think of a sprite world, again metaphorically, as a stage on which your sprite actors may perform.
You use the sprite toolbox to add sprite-based animation to your application. The sprite toolbox, which is a set of data types and functions, handles all the tasks necessary to compose and modify sprites, their backgrounds and properties, in addition to transferring the results to the screen or to an alternate destination.
This chapter is divided into the following major sections:
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