CompuServe Messages

There has been an on-going dicussion on ANIM on BIX for several months. Most of the work was done by Gary Bonham with input by Jim Kent. The first piece of an ANIM is a standard ILBM …. so a paint system can "read" the first frame of the ANIM. We will (probably) release a Freely-distrubuted version of the showanim system. There is also a GrabAnim program (working, but still in development) that functions like Grabbit(tm) …. that is you can use GrabAnim to create ANIM's of any sequence of frames!!! I even made an animation of workbench!! I have seen differental compression (which is what ANIM uses) but not in a stand alone file format before ANIM. All the pieces of ANIM are "basically" ILBM's with standard compression. (there is a trick involving how the ILBM are "blitted"). The file format missied making the latest cut of documentation (commodore) by a month or so. Oh I should mention that ShowAnim will use FAST RAM for Bitmaps, this wasn't easy …. but it's required for longer animations. Aegis has supported IFF from the start. Sonix saves scores in IFF… Draw, Animator, and IMPACT support IFF …. future products will support IFF. IFF is a very good idea and needs to be promoted. W. Volk.