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This article also appeared in the 09/2001 Issue of The LUCKY Report newsletter.

Graphic Interpretation - Animations
by Bruce Thomas

The basic GEOS package allows users to do so much it is sometimes difficult to decide on a topic. I took the easy way out this time and decided to start at the beginning.

Of course, the beginning of GEOS is the letter G. What I am going to do is take that letter G, which stands for Graphical, and turn it into a letter A, which stands for Animation. It's a neat trick. Stick around.

A picture is worth

The initial drawing package for GEOS users was geoPaint. It wasn't the best drawing package around and, if you have used geoCanvas, you know that it is no longer even the best GEOS drawing package either. But, it had a full family of integrated applications with which to share its artwork, and sharing is a powerful motivator.

It didn't take long before people started creating pages of new drawings and collections of Clip Art (tucked neatly into Photo Albums with the Photo Manager DA). Many disk collections came on the market offering graphics of all types, sizes and quality.

This abundance of graphics, along with the ease with which geoPaint and the rest of the GEOS family let users add images to projects, enabled far too many people to create far too many overcrowded announcements, invitations and greeting cards. It was this freedom to express oneself that helped make GEOS a popular system.

After creating all of these masterpieces there came a time when people started to ask "What now?". As usually happens in the GEOS world, some talented programmers answered the call.

Let there be movement

First up in early 1989 was Dennis Seitz with Album Animator. This neat little program lets you take photo albums and view them as a flipbook. These flipbooks provide the illusion of movement and are, essentially, a poor-mans animated movie. Album Animator arrived at my house on GeoWorld Disk #4 with three Photo Albums to Animate. Pretty neat stuff.

Next up in 1990 was Francis G. Kostella with GeoAnimator from the RUN Magazine GEOS Companion Disk. GeoAnimator went a number of steps further than Album Animator in that it let the user save stand-alone animations. These could then be viewed by anyone without the main program. The stand-alone files could incorporate a musical soundtrack as well.

As we move from the first simple program to the second there is a little more user interaction required. This comes in the form of a script file that the user must create in geoWrite to control the animations. The scripts are not hard to write and there are only 12 commands (really just 11 and one for inserting comments) to use while creating your masterpiece. We'll look at a rudimentary script shortly.

The above two programs are great once you have an album made up of images suitable for animation. Most of us aren't talented enough to create such a sequence of images and that is where the next program comes in very handy.

geoMaster

We have all seen neat animations where one object turns into another. In essence, that is what geoMorph enables every user to create. We start with two photo scraps and the program creates a sequence of intermediate images that transition the first image into the second one. By saving these intermediate images into a Photo Album (between the first two images) as they are created we have an album that the first two programs can use for animations.

Maurice Randall created geoMorph in 1993 and it was initially a shareware program on Qlink. It is also available on the disk with the full version of geoFAX. The documentation states that geoMorph is an initial stage of a full-blown commercial package called Photo Frame although Maurice tells me he has no immediate plans to work on Photo Frame.

Show and Tell

Here is where we get to have some fun. Let's do what I promised at the start and change the letter G into the letter A and then, to add a bit more, change it back again.

I have copied geoPaint, geoWrite, geoMorph, Album Animator, geoAnimator40 (there are 40 and 80 column versions of this), Photo Manager and the LW-Roma font to a partition on my RAM Disk. Opening geoPaint I create a new document and paste in the letters G and A set in Bold LW-Roma.

To make it easier to copy both letters to Photo Scraps of the same size I use the Color Tool to color the background canvas and then copy each letter to separate Photo Scraps and paste them into a new Album. Since I want to run two sequences of images (in reverse order) I paste the Letter A into the Album twice after one Letter 'G'. The second one is just a placeholder that will allow me to add my second intermediate sequence images as I go. It will be deleted later.

Next, open geoMorph (and watch the cool intro animation) and then paste in the Letter 'A'. Swapping this to the secondary image location (lower Icon) I have a blank page again to paste in the Letter 'G'. This may seem backwards but the Letter G is where I want to start and the letter A is where I want to finish my animation.

Clicking on the middle (frame) Icon in geoMorph creates the first of my intermediate frames. I then use the Edit menu to Copy this image to a Photo Scrap and open Photo Manager from the GEOS menu. Once Photo Manager is open I flip ahead (the first Letter A is showing) and Paste from the Edit menu. My image is inserted before the first Letter 'A'.

You now have two choices for the return sequence. You can use the same images, just in reverse order (in which case you would insert the same image after the first Letter 'A"). Or, you can create a separate sequence in geoMorph going from A to G and then Paste those images into the Album while the second Letter 'A' is visible. I'll leave the choice up to you. I ended up with 6 intermediate images for each sequence. After I Cut the second Letter A out I am left with a total of 14 images in my album.

With my Album all set I can fire up Album Animator and see how it looks. If everything looks acceptable I am ready to get to work on my script file for geoAnimator.

Simple Programming Language

Firing up geoWrite I now get started on my masterpiece. The first command I need to use is ALBUM to tell geoAnimator which album to load. Albums can be loaded in at any time during a script so don't worry if you need to have more than 60 images (The Photo Manager limit) in your animations.

Next up I want to place my first image on to the screen. For this I use the Photo command along with three parameters. The first parameter is the number of the Photo Scrap in the Album. The second number is the X position across the screen and the third number is the Y position down the screen for the image top corner. In this case I used the following line:

Photo 1,5,15

For this simple animation the defaults of 0,0 could have been used but, when testing, the script readout in geoAnimator overwrites the top left corner.

In order to slow the whole thing down a bit we can use the Delay command with a value from 1 - 255. This line is entered next and then the Photo and Delay commands are repeated for each image in the Album. Those three commands are all that are needed for a simple animation. The other commands allow you to add some flair to your animations by changing the screen patterns, looping through a series of commands, loading a new script file and adding frames and lines to the display.

I have created a short script file and this, along with the Photo Album it uses, geoMorph, Album Animator and the stand-alone animation created with geoAnimator, will be included on the GO64! Disk with this issue. CMD still sells the RUN GEOS Companion disk if you wish to do these kinds of things on your own.

Until next time, enGEOy your Commodore!