Having an animation method allows GUI-side optimizations that aren't
possible when the animation is smeared across the socket/parser/eval'er.
Determinism: GUI rendering isn't deterministic, at least not in the way Pd's
scheduler is. For example, how could the GUI (tcl/tk or otherwise) even
know that it missed a deadline?
I guess the simple API I'm toying with is "stretching the accordion" so to
speak, and potentially showing the cracks more explicitly with a longer
running animation than can currently be seen in Pd's GUI. But that can be
remedied, either by recursively halving a single animation into smaller ones,
or just giving up and using [line].
The greater benefit is that more elegant types of visual feedback become
possible without being discarded out of hand due to their potential for
audio interruption.
-Jonathan
On Monday, January 4, 2016 5:20 PM, Ivica Ico Bukvic <[email protected]> wrote:
On 1/3/2016 3:24 PM, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
It's actually way more simplistic than that-- just an "animate" method
that
wraps around whatever attribute is available to the drawing command. All
I'll have is a ramp time, an optional delay time, and an optional easing
curve.
That will make it a bit like a [vline~] for GUI side animation.
I'm using the web animations API because it makes things very simple, even
to do complex things like animating path data.
The idea is that this would open up some modest visualization opportunities
that are otherwise too cpu intensive. For example, if you're animating
using [line] the socket messages can quickly get in the way of the audio.
Will you at some point drown the CPU? Sure, but that is no different than a
million of other ways of doing the same. OTOH, implementing the animation this
way helps you ensure that your animation remains in sync with the audio, which
to me seems much better gain than a potential CPU/socket overhead may be a
shortcoming.
There could be some very cool ways of filtering gui messages, as well (short
of getting rid of the socket-based communication in favor of a shared
memory/multithreaded design). For instance, your animation object could be
given the screen refresh rate and therefore it would not send out a message via
a socket unless a desired frame-worth of time has transpired since the last
message was sent. This would do wonders not just in terms of animation, but
also the overall gui responsiveness, if implemented system-wide.
Best,
Ico
-Jonathan
On Sunday, January 3, 2016 1:08 PM, Ivica Ico Bukvic <[email protected]> wrote:
I think it may make sense in addition to having a one-shot-independent
animations that have no guarantee of staying in sync with the audio (e.g. these
could be useful for mouse-over button animations) that your animation object
can also receive a decimal value between its originator and destination,
allowing for each keyframe to be a whole number. So, 0-1 would interpolate
between the starting state and first keyframe, 1-2 between first and second
keyframes, etc., and thus allow pd to use its timing mechanism to project
changes in animation state via a line object, a counter or something similar.
IIRC most (all?) HTML5-based animations can be triggered as independent events
or can be given a specific percentage value. The one-shot object could interact
with independent events, while the proposed object could interact with the
latter.
That said, not knowing how you have imagined your animation object, it may be
tricky to implement this as it would require object to keep track of all the
keyframed events (assuming there are more than one). If you are thinking of
having the animation object track only one single animation (e.g. something
progressing from 30% to 90%), the same could still prove useful except in this
case you would only allow for values between 0 and 1.
On 1/2/2016 1:12 PM, Jonathan Wilkes via Pd-list wrote:
Hi list, I'm playing with adding a simple animation api to data structure
drawing commands.
The parameters will be sent to the GUI, and the GUI will take care of the
ramp, delay, etc.
I'm thinking of just making it a simple "set it and forget it" api. That is,
you send a message
with your ramp and delay times to the GUI, and you just blindly trust that
the GUI will make
things happen in the right amount of time. The alternative I can think of is
to have the GUI
call back when an animation is finished, but that would encourage mixing the
two clocks
(i.e., GUI and Pd clock) in unpredictable
ways.
Does this simple approach seem like a reasonable design? The biggest problem
would be that
a long-running animation could skew. But in that case you could probably
amortize the cost of sending more messages over the longer time period.
-Jonathan
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