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RE: [nebula-dev] Animation framework

Hi Nicolas,

 

Read replies below...

 

From: Nicolas Richeton
Sent: Monday, January 19, 2009 9:33 AM

 

Thanks for sharing this document. It shows that there is a real demand for an animation API. Both your framework and SAT API are very close :

 

 

Animator.start(

    new Move(control, new Point(0, 0), new Point(100, 100),

             Easing.FAST, Easing.EaseInOutQuad);

  )

 

the same with SAT : 

 

new AnimationRunner().runEffect( 

            new MoveControlEffect( shell, 0,0, 100, 100, 4000, new ExpoOut(), null, null )   /* the last two parameters are onStop and onCancel runnable */

);

[Roland Tepp] Judging by the api samples, I’d say our only difference here is really in the verbosity of the naming conventions
:) Of course the devil is always in the details ;)

 

So it should be possible to take the best part of each API to build the nebula one. 

[Roland Tepp] I agree, we should at least discuss out API decisions and find the common ground to work from so that in case my appeal to open source my animation stuff does not get approved (or it takes too long to get approved), we might at least get the best ideas out of it ;)

 

Here are my comments based on your document :

 

- I like the way you use constants for duration and easing equations. Allowing optionnal parameters also makes declaration clearer. 

[Roland Tepp] Well, I like this style too :)

 

Optional parameters are little tough though. Specially the cascading properties – I have not yet figured out a decenty way to do this without compicating the hell out of the internals of animation initialization code...

In my current implementation I have omited those. Not as pretty as I would like, but it serves the purpose for now...

 

- Combining effects with Sequence and Parallel is nice. It should be easy to implement on SAT too.

[Roland Tepp] Mhmh. What I did essentially was to create a tree of animations and made Parallel and Sequence responsible for firing frame events on the contained animations.

 

- You seem to use threads for animations which is what I did first, but now I use Display#timerExec() so everything is kept in the main thread (smaller footprint, frame skipping, no need to use async/sync exec). Another advantage is that control properties cannot change while you are calculating your next value.

[Roland Tepp] I do ... I tried the Display#timerExec(), but opted for a separate thread. (Actually –I use copied implementation of UIJob to do that, but I am currently considering changing the implementation to live entirely on the Java concurrency api).

 

This allowed me to keep ticking away frame events at a constant thread with a hope that if ever the ui became unresponsive, the animator would not be too severely affected (I realize that UIJob actually waits for the UI thread to complete before scheduling another frame, so this definetly needs to change).

 

Besides – My design was to keep the animation framework itself platform agnostic, so that I could essentially take the core api and use it to animate Swing or text based ui or do all kinds of unforseeable  nasty things with it that might have next to nothing to do with UI :)

 

- SAT supports cancelation for effects. This allows to redefine a transition while it's running. (required for replacing mouse wheel behavior by an animation for instance).

[Roland Tepp] So does my little animation framework .

In practice I’ve only done that once – I’ve found that it is much easier to design code in such a way, that transitions run their due course than go around cherry’picking animations to cancel and replace them with other animations... However, sometimes there is just no way around it  :)

 

We have now 3 API (with e4) we can get inspiration from. We should be able to create something very cool :)

[Roland Tepp] Oh ... I didn’t know that... I should probably thake a look at their api and features...

 

Thanks,

--

Nicolas


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