home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
Floppyshop 2
/
Floppyshop - 2.zip
/
Floppyshop - 2.iso
/
art&graf.ix
/
art-0072
/
animtool
/
animtool.doc
< prev
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1997-04-16
|
10KB
|
211 lines
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
| ANIMTOOL is copyright (c) 1991 by Martin Packer. All rights reserved. |
| |
| Permission is granted for unrestriced non-commercial use and |
| distribution by individuals, public domain libraries and BBS's. |
| With the condition that it must be accompanied by this file. |
| |
| If you find any bugs, have any suggestions for improvements, feel |
| the urge to send me large quantities of money, or just want to say |
| hi! Please write to me: |
| |
| Martin Packer |
| 81B Preston Road |
| Brighton |
| East Sussex |
| U.K. |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
ANIMTOOL is a utility for stringing a sequence of low-res image files
together into an animation. It uses delta compression (only storing the
differences between frames) to reduce the size and increase the playback
speed of the animation files it generates.
The original command line version of ANIMTOOL came about because I wanted
to animate some scenes I'd generated using David Buck's DKBTrace Ray-
Tracer.
There are two versions of ANIMTOOL:
ANIMTOOL.PRG
Is a version with a nice GEM front-end which allows animations to be
loaded, played, manipulated in memory and saved.
ANIMTOOL.TTP
Is a single pass command line version which can play an animation or
carry out one of the manipulation operations. Because it only carries out
one operation at a time (and because the program itself is quite a lot
smaller), it uses a lot less memory than the GEM version, so it can be
used to build and play larger animations if memory is getting tight. This
version can also be renamed ANIMTOOL.PRG and placed in an auto folder,
where it will attempt to load and play the animation SEQUENCE.TAT in the
root directory of the boot disk.
A Quick Guide to the Features of ANIMTOOL:
ANIMTOOL.PRG is controlled from a single full screen dialogue. Here's
what the various bits mean:
Current Animation:
Filename: The name of the current animation. The default
animation file is SEQUENCE.TAT. When you run
ANIMTOOL this file will be loaded if it exists.
Number of Frames: The total number of frames in the animation.
Default Speed: When you load a new animation into ANIMTOOL.PRG,
the playback speed will be set to the
animation's default value. This is also the
speed it will normally run at when played by
ANIMTOOL.TTP.
Repeat: Animations can be set to repeat indefinitely
when played. This is the default setting which
works in the same way as the default speed.
Load: Click here to load an animation. If you want to
create a new animation, click here and type the
name into the file selector.
Save: Click here to save the current animation.
Save As: Click here to save the current animation with a
different file name.
Workspace:
When you run ANIMTOOL it will grab the largest chunk of memory it
can find to use as its workspace. This tells you how many bytes
you've used and how much you've got left.
Show Frame Info:
A "frame" is actually the stored differences between one screen
image in the animation and the next. A frame consists of one or two
records. If the two screen palettes differ, the frame will contain a
palette record. If the screen images are similar, with no large-
scale differences, then the frame will contain a delta record, which
contains only the differences between the images. If the screen
images are too dissimilar for a delta record to be worthwhile, the
frame will contain a screen dump record, which contains all 32000
bytes of the new screen image. By entering a frame number here, or
selecting it using the + and - buttons, and clicking on "Show Frame
Info" you can find out which records are present in a frame and how
many bytes the frame occupies.
Play Animation:
Clicking here plays the current animation. Press escape at any time
to stop.
Speed: Selects the playback speed of the animation. The
number here indicates how long each image in the
animation will be displayed for, in VBL's
(vertical blanks - the time taken for the
television/monitor display to be refreshed - on
UK systems, one VBL is 1/50th of a second). With
a complicated animation (where the delta frames
are larger than about 12K) it may not be
possible to play the animation at maximum speed
(1 VBL/frame). It's possible to get an idea of
the maximum playing speed for an animation by
setting the speed to 0. If you do this the
animation will be played at maximum possible
speed without it being sychronised with the
screen refresh. The currently set speed will be
saved as the default speed when you save an
animation.
To Frame: If a number is entered here the animation will
only play up to the frame indicated. In
combination with "Pause" this lets you isolate
and view a single frame.
Repeat: If "Yes" is selected the animation will repeat
indefinitely when played. This feature should
only be used if the first frame of the animation
contains a dump record (it usually does). If it
doesn't, strange things will happen because the
animation routines assume that the screen starts
off cleared to colour 0 and the first frame (if
it contains a delta record) will depend on this.
The current repeat state will be saved as the
default when you save an animation.
Pause: If "Yes" is selected, after playing an
animation, the computer will wait for a keypress
before returning to the control screen.
Step: If "Yes" is selected, the computer will wait for
a keypress between each frame of the animation.
Add Degas Image Frame:
Click here to add the indicated degas image to the animation.
FileName: Click here and select the file containing the
image you want to append to your animation.
Dump Frame: When "Add Degas Image Frame" is selected,
ANIMTOOL will usually try to generate a delta
record for the new image. You can force a screen
dump record to be generated by selecting this
button.
Add Loop Frame:
Usually the animation will progress in sequence from one image to
the next. This feature allows you to build loops into your
animation. Loop frames can be used to repeat short sequences, repeat
the whole animation or repeat (effectively pause on) a single frame.
A loop frame is the same as any other frame. A delta (or screen
dump) record and possibly a palette record must be generated holding
the differences between the current last image in the animation and
the one you're looping to. Animation loops can be 'nested' inside
one another to any depth. The "dump frame" button has the same
effect when adding loop frames as with image frames.
Loop To: Select the frame you wan't to loop back to here.
Loop Count: Select the number of times the animation should
loop back before continuing. This number should
be one less than the number of times you want
the loop repeated (it will have played once
already). If you enter a count of 0 the looping
will continue indefinitely.
Delete Last Frame:
Clicking here removes the last frame from the animation.
ANIMTOOL.TTP can do everything that ANIMTOOL.PRG can except deleting the
last frame. As mentioned earlier, it uses less memory than ANIMTOOL.PRG
but it can only carry out one operation per pass. So it's a pretty slow
way to do things if you're loading the animation from a floppy disk each
time. I usually write a CLI batch file which uses ANIMTOOL.TTP to build
my animations.
Usage: ANIMTOOL <filename> <options>
Options:
/H Display help screen.
/I<filename> Degas (PI1) image to append.
/S<speed> Playback speed (VBLs/frame).
+/-R Repeat/don't repeat animation.
/L<frame no.> Append a loop back to this frame
/C<count> Used with /L to define the loop count
/D Force new frame to be a screen dump
If filename is not given the default SEQUENCE.TAT is used.