CompuServe Messages

Well… If the application is custom written (which you pretty much would need to do anyway to get an animation playable on multiple platforms using the same data…), then as long as you write it to use the same format, it really doesn't matter *what* format you use. Amiga's IFF ANIM, Grasp's GL, Autodesk's FLI formats are all effective. Or you could store all the images in a non animation format (like GIF) and assemble frames from that. In fact, that might be your best bet, since the various animation formats all have hidden assumptions about the hardware. (Amiga ANIMs assume a Planar format, nearly all Mac animation stuff assumes a chunky format, I'm not certain how IBM animation formats work… No matter what you do, you are going to be faced with conversion time problem when loading on some or all machines, to get the image in a format in memory which is playable in real time. (I don't know what sort of frame rate you want, for that matter… On some machines a high frame rate would be nearly impossible.) You may even want to design your own format which allows for fast decompression and conversion, if load speed is important. Finally, you may want to ask this over in the Graphics Support Forum as well. That's a sort of central clearing house for people doing graphics on all platforms, and it's possible that someone there knows of something which better fits your needs… –>Steve Bennett