Short: A pointer animator program Author: Tim Kemp Uploader: d morgan ancient couldbeworse co uk Type: util/cdity Version: 2.0 Architecture: m68k-amigaos Distribution: Aminet Kurz: Ein Zeiger Animator programm This program enables you to create animated pointers from a design grid template file, I'm not sure it currently runs right under emulation as I couldn't seem to get it to run a file, I created for it back on my original amiga, and nor do the example ones work either ? maybe it needs an older workbench? I've currently tried running it under workbench 39.29 kickstart 40.68 on a 3.1 Rom under mac FS-UAE running as an A1200 68020, and the pointer doesn't animate correctly, if anyone else can figure this out I would be very grateful as to know whats preventing it from, the file comes from an image I made of my old amiga hard drive and everything else seems to be fine with the image, so I'm sure its maybe just an issue under emulation would be interested to know if someone with an actual amiga could try the example files out. POINTER ANIMATOR! (C)1988 By Tim Kemp ** SHAREWARE ** How To Use the Pointer Animator Introduction: Pointer animator animates the Workbench pointer by substituting its own custom pointer and then rapidly changing the pointer image to cause the animation. The image sequences are standard IFF ILBM files; allowing you to easily edit predefined animations and create your own! In addition to the normal three color pointer, the pointer animator also supports a 15 color pointer! Our eyes are specially designed to detect motion. On a normal Workbench screen with a good contrast between the pointer and display colors, you can easily distinguish the position of the pointer. On a 32 color screen, it can be difficult to identify the pointer. Even with very similar colors, an animated pointer is easy to spot. Starting an Animation: To run a pointer animation from the Workbench, all you need to do is double click on the animation's icon. Running from CLI is only slightly more difficult. If the pointer will work with the default values (listed below), just type: pointeranimator If the pointer doesn't work well with the default values, you can change several parameters on the command line (or in the .info file, from the Workbench.) You can enter as many of these parameters as you need, as flags on the command line: s - speed. (Range= 1-9, Default is 5, or 12 frames/second) (1 = 60 frames/second; the fastest speed) To determine the number of images/second, divide 60 (50 for European machines) by the speed. h - height. The height in picture elements, or "pixels" (Range= 1-255) If you are using a predefined animation, it will already have a specific height. If you specify the wrong height, the animation will roll like a TV with the vertical sync misadjusted. The default height is 16 pixels. x - horizontal offset. Even though the pointer covers an area 16 pixels wide and many pixels high, there is only one pixel position where the pointer actually is; the "hot spot" of the pointer. On most standard pointers, the hot spot is near the upper left corner. You can put this spot wherever you want. The horizontal offset is measured in number of pixels right of the left side of the pointer. The default value is 0. y - vertical offset. This value, together with the horizontal position, determines the position of the hot spot. The vertical offset is measured in pixels down from the top edge. The default value is 0. EXAMPLE: pointer animator shock -s3 -x1 -y1 uses the animation sequence stored in the file "Shock". It causes the animation speed to be 20 frames per second and the hot spot to be one pixel down and to the right of the top left corner of the pointer. This command could easily be inserted into your Startup-Sequence to cause the pointer animator to be automatically invoked when you turn on your Amiga. You can also set these parameters from the Workbench. First select the file by clicking once on the animation file's icon. Then select "Info" from the Workbench menu. The bottom line of the window that appears should be labeled "TOOL TYPES". It will probably contain a line that says something like "SPEED=5". This line corresponds to the 's' flag. By using the up and down arrow gadgets you can step though all of the parameters. They should read something like this: SPEED=5 HEIGHT=16 X OFFSET=0 Y OFFSET=0 If any of these are missing, you can add them by clicking on the "ADD" gadget. When you are done, click on "SAVE" to keep the changes you made. (Warning: There is a well-known bug in 1.2 which sometimes makes it very frustrating to enter several tool types without getting everything screwed up when the info window is saved. Check the info window again after saving) Stopping the Animation: If for some reason you need to stop an animated pointer, double click on the "PointerStopper" icon, or run "PointerStopper" from the CLI. If you are just switching between animations, it will be done automatically. For More Fun: I strongly suggest you go make some of your own animations. It's very easy and the results are often better than you would have expected. How To Make an Animated Pointer: What's an Animation? (a short history) If you've never seen a television or watched a Disney movie, this description isn't going to mean much to you. You have some outside research to do. I expect you have seen Tweety outsmart Sylvester, Jerry do horrible things to Tom and the coyote fall off cliffs hundreds of times and therefore understand what animation is. While you are not going to produce anything that even remotely resembles a really good animation using the pointer animator, the concepts are the same and with some imagination, you can make animations which will hold people's interest & get your message across. An animation is a series of still frames. Each of the frames represents a point in time. By showing the frames rapidly, in sequence, an illusion of motion is created. The shorter the time between frames, the more smooth the animation appears and the more frames needed to represent the same total time. The maximum speed of a pointer animation varies depending on which version of Amiga you have. If you live in North America, chances are pretty good your maximum rate is 60 frames per second; otherwise you may have 50. What You Need to Make an Animation: A good paint program, a good imagination, & the pointer animator programs are all you need to produce pointer animations. The Paint Program should be able to select 2 or 4 bit planes (4 or 16 maximum colors). It must also be able to save rectangular brushes from 1 to 32 pixels wide in an IFF ILBM format file. Another useful function is the ability to display the X,Y position of the cursor. I use Deluxe Paint Version 2.0 by Electronic Arts. Planning Your Animation: Before you start actually working on your animation, I suggest you sit down and think about what you want to produce. The animated pointer has several limitations when compared to other forms of animation: First is pointer size: Your animation cannot be wider than 32 lo-res pixels. Secondly, you must decide how many colors you want to use. You have two choices; 3 and 15. The normal Workbench pointer uses three colors. If you can produce your animation using only three colors, your pointer will work properly with almost every program. Again because of the way the Amiga's hardware works, by using fifteen colors, you are using up the colors for all of the hardware sprites. This shouldn't normally matter because not many programs use the hardware sprites. Also, any program that opens a screen after the pointer animator has started, will get the proper lower three colors, but the upper twelve colors will be set to the system's default colors (by designing your pointer with the default colors you can get rid of this problem.) OK, now you know most of the limitations of the animation system. It's time to discuss the actual animation. The pointer animations are loops. That means that as soon as the last frame has been displayed, the first frame is displayed again. When you are working out an animation concept, you should take that into account. For example, it would be hard to make a "clean" animation of a breaking vase. After the vase had broken and the pieces were laying at the bottom of the frame, how would you explain the vase becoming whole again when the loop restarted? A much better animation would be a bouncing ball. The ball could start at the top, fall to the bottom and then bounce back to the top where the loop could repeat. This brings up another point. Although it's a matter of style, I personally feel that it is best not to draw attention to the fact that the pointer size is limited. In the ball example, I feel it would be preferable to have some visible object at the bottom of the pointer for the ball to bounce off of. Of course the object at the bottom would itself point out the bottom of the pointer, but it wouldn't look as though the ball was bouncing off the image boundary. Another idea to keep in mind is that a pointer should be useful for pointing. To be easy to use, a pointer should contain at least one point that doesn't move. This point can be anywhere in the pointer although the top left corner is customary. It is also good if the pointer has a couple of contrasting colors close together so that the pointer will stand out on any possible background. Once you have your animation concept, you should storyboard it. That is, you should draw some rough sketches of what you hope to accomplish and annotate them with the approximate amount of time between each sketch. If your animation is extremely simple (like most of mine) the storyboard itself can be made into your final animation. But if you are planning a more complicated animation (and I hope you are) you will probably have several frames in the final animation between each sketch of your storyboard. After you have your idea storyboarded you can probably estimate the tallest frame you will need. If you can fit it in it is best to keep your pointer 16 pixels high since this is the one variable that can be changed to really screw up the appearance of an animation (and the default height is 16.) Drawing Your Animation Now, you have all the tools you need and you have a well thought out idea to make the animation from. There is a drawing in this archive called "DesignGrid". I used this drawing as a guide while I was drawing my first animations. Along the left side are some 16 pixel wide columns. They are divided by things that look like ladders. The "rungs" of these ladders are 16 pixels apart. On the right side are many boxes. The inside dimensions of these boxes are 16x16 pixels. The reason for 16x16 is that this is the normal maximum pointer size. To use this guide, first pick the colors you plan to use. The first color (color zero) will be transparent in the completed pointer. Draw any objects which will remain stationary into one of the boxes. Then cut that box out as a brush, and paste it into all of the other boxes to use as a guide. Then go back and start drawing in the rest of the frames. When you are done with a large number of the frames, arrange them for saving. Cut out the first frame, making sure to cut just inside the top and bottom. Leave the sides on for a guide in placing the brush. Put the brush at the top of the first column on the left side. Make sure to line up the bottoms of the box sides with the first rung of the ladders. Then continue cutting out each frame in turn and placing it in the column below the last frame. When you are done with the first column, go to the top of the next. The most important thing to remember here is that the frames should all be the same height. After all the frames are pasted into columns, cut out an entire column as a brush, and save it to disk. Make sure you cut just inside of the ladders so that the brush will be sixteen pixels wide. Also make sure that the height of each brush is an exact multiple of the height of one frame. When you have all of the columns saved, you are ready to merge them into one animation. Using merge: One of the programs supplied with the pointer animator is called "merge". It must be run from the CLI, & is used to add columns of frames end to end. It can also be used to add a message to the front of your animation. USAGE: merge [-t] [...[in filen]] Where: is the combination of all the input files. Don't use the same name for as for one of the . This would cause hard feelings and quite possibly cause you to lose the contents of your file. is a standard ASCII text file (NOT an IFF file) each input file is an IFF ILBM file. All the files must be the same number of colors and the same width. Only the color map from the first file is saved. Any other "extraneous" information, such as color range, is discarded. As an example let's suppose we have just finished an animation of a fish swimming, to send off to Fred. We want to produce a file called "Fish" we have four column files named "col1", "col2", "col3" and "col4". In addition we have a text file named "fishtext" which contains the following paragraph. "I am dedicating this animation to Fred Fish. I would like to express my appreciation for what Mr. Fish has done for the Amiga community.." To put all this together you would type: merge Fish -tfishtext col1 col2 col3 col4 Now we have a file named "Fish". While we are in the CLI, we might as well make the .info file for our animation. As luck would have it, we have another animation named "Flag". So we will make a copy of its .info file for our new file. Type: [35m copy Flag.info Fish.info If You Use Pointer Animator... If you use it please pay for it. If I distributed this commercially I would charge between $10 and $20. I won't ask for a particular amount, but please use these values as guidelines. In addition to the money, I would be glad to hear any comments or suggestions on any of my programs. Please send all correspondence to: Tim Kemp, P.O. Box 23101, Columbus, OH 43223