CompuServe Messages

The history of ANIM is long and garbled. It is a tremendous example of the IFF standard process gone wrong. The Aegis ANIM format was poorly documented and poorly implemented in VideoScape 1.0. They since changed it, and there are bits and pieces explaining the changes on BIX. Sculpt's author decided the VS 1.0 compression was lousy (hey, so did Aegis, they changed it…) so he created his own, but didn't want to release it. For that matter, Forms In Flight, Silver, Animator: Apprentice all use different formats. I know some of them will incorporate ANIM to some extent in the future, which means things will get even more muddled in the coming months, when products implement different variations of ANIM. There are a number of other changes to ANIM that will be requested at the developer conference, so I wouldn't expect it to be all nailed down until several months afterwards. By then, there will be PD code for playing and recording from at least one other source besides Aegis.