Vector Player

[sovenyimre]

I created a simple animation player and creator tool.

I’ve been playing for a long time with the idea of being able to make animations as simple and as small as possible on amiga. As a result, this player was born. Compared to other similar players, it uses vector data for display....like State of the Art, Nine Fingers or The Black Lotus demo. I set it to 25 FPS but the more data you use, the higher the resource requirement, so the playback speed depends on it. With the Winuae emulator, it is capable of movie-like animations up to 32 colors. The animation can be created under windows. The downloadable file contains the necessary tools for the creation. Player supports subtitles in start+end framecode code format.

Problem: In my previous attempt, I loaded the whole animation into Ram. It ate a lot of RAM but was faster. Now... I have focused on the larger files so the frames are loaded one by one due to the possibility of Time-frame positioning. If I manage to load the data in larger sections, the playback would be faster.... I am satisfied with the result, but If anyone can help with this do not hesitate
The Creator part use Potrace and a program of mine. You only have to copy a BMP image sequence (I used Virtualdub to do that) into the right folder and execute the converter. The sequence starts from 0.... and up NNNNNN. The result is a "Seq.dat" file... it is the finall anim file.

The program was written in AMOS so needless to say it could be faster. I also included the source code for those who want to play with it.

The animations are not self-made! I only use them as a test data.

The player
2 Color = black and white (1 bitplane)
16 Color = Greyscale (4 bitplane)
16x2 Color = Greyscale (4 bitplane +1 bitplane for a different shade)
32 Color = Fix palette with 32 Color (2 bitplane greys and +3 bitplane for +R+G+B)

keys:
O turn on/off OnScreenDisplay (ruler, timer mouse)
L Load anim
-B,E,S Select Begin...End position and Save it in a separated file.
I Screenshot
X,C,V Change between palettes
Num keys turn on/off blitter fill
Left , Right Rev-FF
Up, Down Frame by Frame step

Download:
https://electricblacksheep.itch.io/vectoranim-player

[saimon69]

What about a proper handling of shapes - better than fantavision btw, so selection, point editing, group/split, timlelines, keyrames OR morphs?
(yeah i know am hard to please ^^)

[sovenyimre]

I certainly don't want to move shapes as one, or morph, or anything that calculates a position while it's playing. I am no pro and I also want to keep it simple. I don't think anyone will move regular shapes (cubes or circles) as a single object, but sure... adding shapes, selecting and editing points one by one to move and make it more complex or simple was a plan and will be included ... if I have the time.
Has anyone used Fantasivision at all? I found nothing but the example animations on disk.

[saimon69]

I remember i tried, and was frustrated that shapes HAD to morph, no keyframe support there in the way i wanted - plus no grouping like in a vector drawing program like in example freehand or flash - there was also Aegis Animator that had a similar approach, however i ignore whether was using keyframes