On Tuesday, February 26, 2002, at 03:49 AM, Matt Denton wrote:
> I'm building a cute little app that displays a series off five animated > objects, based on a series of timed events, animating usually only one > object at a time. I'm having a lot of trouble getting the 'speed' up > and keeping it consistent. I know some clever cookies on this list > have worked out or found ways to speed up -- sometimes many many > multiples of speed increase, such as pencil tool instead of line tool > for turtle graphics -- all sorts of graphics and text handling. I'm > hoping someone can help... > The problem is I have 10 objects, each with masks attached. Originally > I fudged the masks, and tried animated GIFs with but that blew out my > project size as I had to 'render off' about 200 animations, ie no > masks. Surprisingly the animated GIFs didn't seem to perform very well > anyway...??? FWIW, animated GIFs *should* work fine. I've built a lot of things you shouldn't do with animated GIFs in MC and have had good results. One stack in particular ran between 30 and 40 animated GIFs simultaneously, randomly changing frames and positions, and this worked flawlessly on Mac systems (but choked on Win98), so I'm not sure why you are experiencing problems as you describe. Your laptop *may* have an old video driver (if there is one) or high power optimization settings. Keep in mind you don't have to rely on the built in frame timing of the GIF -- you can use MC/REV to display any frame of the GIF at any time. I often purposely set frame timing to 1 fps when building GIFs for use in MC/REV so I can see the results on screen when controlled via script. Write your own scripts to manage GIF playback, and take note of the following functions: - frameCount - repeatCount - currentFrame And now that we can control the blendLevel of images, you can play animated GIFs translucently, while moving them across the screen and controlling their frame rate as desired. This is a somewhat underestimated feature of MC/REV for creating animation that in some cases rivals video. As far as PNGs go, my experience has been that manual image swapping (via setting the icon of a button) can achieve almost the same speed/performance as animated GIF, even with 8 bit masks, as long as the images do not overlap. As soon as the objects touch, the playback speed drops to about 1/2 of normal speed or less. Kudos must go to the MC/REV teams for providing all this control over images. Now we just need to get some antialiased text and draw objects in there... :-) Regards, Scott Rossi Creative Director, Tactile Media [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.tactilemedia.com _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
