CompuServe Thread

Thanks for keeping us honest, Stephen! We have your extremely long bug report form, and have answers to your questions. 1)You had commented that AAPro, configured to run with a SummaSketch III, creates objects with incorrect aspect ratio, including circles. We have verified this, and is now written up as a bug. Thank you for pointing this out to us. 2)"Upon startup of ani, intermittent problem occurs about half the time: cursor is locked up." This is not something we have been able to duplicate here on 2 different machines. This suggests a setup or hardware problem to me, rather than a bug in our driver as was the case above. Is your digitizer in a non-default mode? We took the SummaSketch III out of the box, plugged it in, and ran it for a full day as the pointing device, including exiting and restarting AAPro. No other setup. Try booting plain, Files and buffers = 40, and a mouse and prompt. See if this affects the problem. 3) "Ani\cfig386 ani.exe -maxreal FFFh in autoexec.bat makes no difference to the DOS shell." I can confirm this. We tried using FFFh and this worked. (Page 14 of the New Features manual states FFFFh.) If you have been using FFFFh and you made a mistake reporting it as FFFh, you should try manually setting the CFIG386 setting while in the ANI directory, and then starting up ANI directly from there. Let us know if you still have trouble. 4)"Pixelpop utilty does not work. PP.BAT doesn't work. PPGIFV.EXE does…" Pixelpop may look like it's not working when you run AAPro higher than 320×200. Look at page 1-2 of the Utility User's Guide where it explains the limitation in resolution. When I configure for 320×200, it works as documented. Otherwise, your pp.bat looks correct, and should not result in "bad command or file name". 5)"I have a flic made by joining (cut) several segments with different palettes, some joins with combine color maps, and some with No Fitting. All cuts produce a flash of colors when playing back." Yes, you should expect those flashes as the frame on screen gets briefly displayed with the palette being prepared for the next frame. You note that you were able to resolve the flash with One Palette, and you have found the correct solution. You note that the animation (which you included with your bug form) has a colored border that you can not draw in. This is not related to the KEY color, however. Take a look at your 256 palette: the very first color slot is responsible for the border color. It's usually wise to make all your palette adjustments without causing a change to the first slot, typically RGB 0,0,0. The border of your animaiton returns to black when corrected. 6)"On the Tween menu, [back] does not undo." Under what circumstances do you refer? It appears to work here. This email continued, when I get my typing fingers massaged! You have raised other points…. Nik

More of your message! By the way, thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed letter. It took a while for you to write, and it's through letters like yours that the product improves. The 2 remaining points you bring up are wishlist items, as you correctly assumed. Next Blue replaces the blued figure with a transparent key color. If you have something on the next frame, and your blued figure is superimposed on top of that: well, you're right. Unbluing will take away both the blued image, as well as what was originally there underneath, replacing it with the key color… I think it should allow you to preserve the image, and just take away the blued image. A wishlist item. Finally, you commented that you would like to composite flics of unequal length, and use the WRAP command to loop the imported shorter flic through all the frames of the larger animation. Instead, you explain, we offer the option to wrap the larger animation to the front of the shorter. I would not like to lose the functionality of being able to wrap longer frames to the front of shorter ones, but I accept your point that it would be great to loop shorter flics to the end of the longer one. Entered as a wishlist item. Thank you. Nik