Athens graphics are fast enough that it is possible to do high frame-rate animations. I've been trying (and, to various degrees, succeeding) in adding animations to my touch applications. I'm using stepping to do it. Basically, you just move pieces / update the display when step gets called. If you set the stepTime to 30, you should get somewhere around 30 frames per second, which is quite smooth.
The problem I have is that the step mechanism in Pharo seems to block out the UI thread. In Squeak, you could return 0 for the stepTime message and then step would get called each UI cycle. In Pharo, the two seem to be disconnected. If the stepTime is too low, the processor will be busy doing redrawing and the UI loop is stopped. When I do stepTime of 20, the UI stops responding until after the animation is over. When I do stepTime of 50, the UI keeps working. The lower the stepTime, the smoother the animation, but also the chance that the UI becomes unresponsive. That's a nasty tradeoff. Is there a good way to do step style animation without this tradeoff? Why was stepping and the UI loop separated? Is there a different way that animation should be implemented? Cheers, Jeff -- Jochen "Jeff" Rick, Ph.D. http://www.je77.com/ Skype ID: jochenrick
