AnimView2  -  Sprite animation viewer

by Gary Lee

AnimView2 is an easy-to-use application for creating and viewing animations made up from a sequence of Sprites. It is ideal for creating animations for games, and was in fact used by the author during the development of the popular RISC User game Robotix.

A very useful feature of AnimView2 is that the Sprites used to create the animation do not have to be created in any particular order or saved with sequential filenames. AnimView2 takes a single Sprite file containing any number of uniquely named Sprites. Once loaded into AnimView2 you can easily change the order in which the Sprites are animated.

Using AnimView2
To load AnimView2, either click on its icon in the RISC User menu system or double-click on its icon in the Filer window. The AnimView2 icon will appear on the icon bar and an Examples Filer window will open. The Examples directory contains a large selection of example animations created with AnimView2.

Once loaded, click on the AnimView2 icon on the icon bar to open the Animation Sequencer and View windows. The Animation Sequencer window consists of two sections: Sprites and Sequence. When you drag a Sprite file into the window, the name of each Sprite contained within that file will be listed under the Sprites heading. To create a sequence, simply click on each Sprite name under the Sprites heading, in the order in which you want them animated. As you click on them, their names will appear under the Sequence heading, and the animation will automatically be displayed in the View window. If you make a mistake, simply click Adjust over the Sequence area of the window to remove the last Sprite added to the sequence, or click Select to remove the entire sequence and start again.

The View window contains a number of buttons for controlling the animation. The Play and Stop buttons start and stop the animation. Clicking with Adjust on the Play button will reverse the animation, while clicking on the Stop button repeatedly will single-step through the animation. The Fast forward and Rewind buttons control the speed of the animation, with a value of 1 being the fastest, and 99 being the slowest. Clicking with Select or Adjust over the Zoom button or display area will magnify or reduce the animation size, while clicking Menu over the View window will allow you to change the background colour.

To save an animation for future use, click Menu over the Sequence area of the Animation Sequencer window. To save the Sprite file, click Menu over the Sprites section of the window. You can save the current settings from the icon bar menu.

Technical details
The animation file generated by AnimView2 is a Squash-compressed file containing the following information. The first part of the file is a user Sprite area containing the actual Sprite definitions. This is followed by a list of Sprite numbers (one word each) which specifies the order in which the Sprites should be animated. The list is terminated by a -1. Finally, the file contains details of the animation settings: Speed (one byte), Background GCOL (one byte), Zoom factor (one byte). These values are word aligned.

 Copyright RISC User Magazine 1996
