#Playing big FLC's
8 messages in this thread
I have recently created an animation of a bowling scene. The camera follows
the ball and then zooms in for a tight shot of the ball hitting the pins.
(Which will eventually explode when I get my IPAS disk #4). The animation
was rendered at 640 x 480 res with a custom palette to eliminate color
shift. My problem is this: When I play the animation using either AniPro or
AniPlay, at the frames where the camera zooms in and everything in the
scene is in motion, there is flickering of the pins. Quick little jittery
lines flash through them. Also, If I increase the speed of the animation,
even a little, the frame rate of the animation becomes non-linear. i.e. the
ball moves slowly during the zoom section and accelerates after the zooming
is finished. Obviously there is a log jam somewhere and the frames are not
getting displayed quickly enough. Since the animation (which weighs in at
8.4 megabytes) is running from RAM, and I have 32 mb. on my 486/33, and I
am using QEMM, I suspect that the problem is with my display card which is
a simple ET4000 (Orchid Pro II/s) using the 640 x 480 VESA driver. Do you
concur? If it _is_ the card what are my options? Would a faster driver,
such as Panacea's help? Or is the card simply too slow to handle the
throughput? If so, can you suggest a more suitable card for playing
animations on my monitor. I will soon be getting a Magni for output to
tape, so I don't want to spend TOO much money on a card just to output to
the monitor. Thanks.
What a coincidence! Jamie Clay just finished doing an animation of a
bowling alley, with the pins exploding using explode.axp right after the
ball hits them. It's hilarious, too. (great minds think alike, I guess
🙂
The lines that you're talking about are surely due to a VGA card update
problem. If you're rending with dithering ON, you could try it again with
dithering OFF. That'll decrease the size of your deltas and will increase
update speed.
The other problem is that you shouldn't be using the VESA driver with
Animator Pro… you should be using the ET4000 driver that comes with Ani
Pro 1.3. That'll help quite a bit right there.
– G
Gary, Thanks for your reply and Happy Thanksgiving. Sorry to hear that
someone has beat me to the exploding bowling pin animation. Guess I'll have
to try something else. Maybe I'll melt 'em instead. The rendering _was_
done with dither 256 off, but it _is_ a pretty fancy scene. Has shadows,
reflection maps, (on the alley), and a neon sign on the wall. I tried
using the ET4000 driver ( I assume you mean the one contained in
SUPERVGA.DRV), but it crashes the system. This in spite of the fact that
the README.DOC says that the Orchid Pro II is one of the cards that has
been tested. Any other suggestions? Thanks.
Greg LeVasseur
I _also_ have an Orchid II/s card (on my no-name clone with an AMI
motherboards). It works fine with the AAP 1.3 Tseng 4K driver. Which
version of AAP are you using?
– G
Gary-
Thanks again for your prompt reply. I am using AniPro 1.3 on my Tangent
with AMI BIOS. I cannot find any 4K Tseng 4000 drivers anywhere. I even
re-installed Ani to make sure. The drivers I have are TLIVESA.COM in the
ANI/VESA/TSENG directory and SUPERVGA.DRV in the ANI/VESA directory. I have
looked in all the ANI/* directories including the RESOURCE directory and
even searched the CD ROM. SUPERVGA.DRV seems to have some ET4000 drivers
in it but those are the ones that crash!
Greg LeVasseur
I'm using the SUPERVGA.DRV driver, which autodetects the ET4000 chip set.
It appears that that's the driver you're having problems with. Strange,
because I've got the same VGA card as you. I've got no idea why it would
work fine with my Orchid II/s and not with yours. (it works with my system
no matter which memory manager I'm using, as well) Argh, I hate hardware.
– G
I have tried changing my autoexec.bat and config.sys to a complete vanilla
configuration and have tried some different BIOS settings but my venerable
old Pro II/s which heretofore has worked with _everything_ will still not
work with your supervga.drv driver. Any other suggestions?
Greg LeVasseur
Well, let's see. On my system, it says that the Orchid bios on the card is
version 1.1. Is that the same version of the bios that you're using? And
my cpu bios is from AMI, and its date is 7/7/91. I've never had any
trouble with my card with the supervga.drv, so I'm pretty much stumped.
– G