Animation in LiveCode

[Sannyasin Brahmanathaswami]

I’m “back at it” trying to discover all possible means for animation in Livecode. All the high end tools seem to export to video: create your frame based “thing” whatever it is.. then you save as h.264.

I don’t find much that will export to animated GIF — which seems to be the only “native” way to play animation in LiveCode….

The use case is: If we commission some 2D animation… what tools do I need to ask the artist(s) to use and format to give it to me so that we can actually incorporated in to LiveCode?

a) Kids I know want to use Scratch, but that’s a proprietary format (.sb2) with no export to animated GIF
b) There are legions of people using Unity. And I could get any amount of assets done in Unity. But again… how to incorporate into LiveCode?
c) Photoshop and After effects All go out to Video  = a player object in LiveCode

[Is it possible to have transparency in a play object?  I doubt it, but wanted to ask anyway. A hack could be to make a small video and then have this player move around on top of a background and “see through” … I doubt that works at all.]

Other way to go is to make the whole card a player object and do the animation and run the rest of the LC things on top… That also could be very tricky.

SVG animation, looks promising and with the resurgence of SVG perhaps this may one day be possible in Livecode… especially if we could get transparency in the white areas.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/Toy_train_SMIL.svg.

But I don’t see any tools for that kind of creation and LiveCode SVG widget is a long way from being able to play that kind of thing.

A frame based option is to use Scott’s method of storing the text of images of the different frames in custom props and then programmatically driving those out to a single image object… so this gives us a frame based animation… if the “little man” were also moving across the screen and had 5 frames of his legs moving, this could work. Extremely primitive

So, goes back to the key question: if you commission 2D animation, what do you ask for that can be used effectively in LiveCode?

Is anyone using Franklin3D? I got a license ten years ago, but never had time to pursue it.

Is it working on Mobile?

BR


On August 22, 2014 at 2:06:32 PM, Alejandro Tejada (capellan2000 at gmail.com<mailto:capellan2000 at gmail.com>) wrote:

Notice that for this platform there was a dll for playing
interactive 3d animation: Franklin3d, a port of Irrlicht
3D Engine for LiveCode and Real Basic...
Franklin3D demo worked fine on Windows, but I do not
have experience using it in other platforms.