1999-02-14 : Here is my description of the project from when I last worked on it. A big thank you
to 
traker Skunk for hosting this on his web site
for quite a while. I started this project 1998-10-03, and actually made quite a bit of progress on
it. I wonder if I'll take it up again? I'll make the source available when I CVSify it.
Here is the [source] of a work in progress. This program plays MovieSetter animations. You know,
the kind of animations the Eric Schwartz does. It currently works on Win32 platforms.
Other work in this area:
XAnim by Mark Podlipec, for X-Windows.
No sound support.
A port of XAnim by
Michael Kraft, for Win32 with an X server.
ShowMVS by Richard
Mulder, for DOS
Rob Powell is supposed to be working on a version of ShowMVS for Win32 (link?)
Robert Carboneau is working on a player for Linux. (link?)
The most recent changes:
2/10/99
Redo the palette class to make it ref-counting. We now always allocate both types of
palettes, which makes the animation loop faster.
Create a Buffered Reader class. This improves the byte-by-byte reads. Also optimized the
de-interlacing code, which helped significantly. I shaved 2/3 off the loading time.
Lots of UI fixes. You can now rewind to the beginning of the movie. Also, moved the window
stuff into a class. It's getting better
Basic sound support! Yay! Thanks for the pointers, Robert.
New artwork. I put something I drew myself in there instead of
something ripped from someone else, since people tend to get upset about these things.
I Still have to come up with a good icon. And If anybody comes up with a better
name for the program, I'm open to suggestions. :)
So Michael, a friend of mine, came over and said,
"You can't use top level menu items as buttons! You have to use a tool bar!"
I replied, "But I don't know how to do toolbars. You write 'em." And he did. Thanks!
The next things that will be fixed:
The frame timing is all off, and I don't know why. It seems inverted.
What I really need is a reply from Eric to the message I wrote him a couple
of months ago. Time to go into pester mode, I guess.
I want to put in a slider that tells you where you are in the movie.
I want to put in a statistics dialog that tells you about the currently loaded file
I think that I can still improve the memory usage of the Palette class.
An eye towards the future:
Palette swapping does nasty things in 256 color mode. Time to learn DirectDraw.
IFF support sounds cool.
Support modification of the aspect ratio. Wouldn't you know Amigas don't
have a 1:1 aspect ratio.
C o m m e n t s :
(nothing yet)
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