Thursday, December 15, 2005

IFS Designer animates!


The IFS Designer finally does what I intended from the very beginning. It creates animated IFS fractals YAY! It's not polished but the basic functionality of creation, animation and exporting is there. I've also consolidated it so that the matrix library and the required ltk-goodie are in the 0.1.0 archive. You still have to copy the .asd files to the right place because I have no idea how to work adsf-install. I expect that'll change soon if Peter Seibel and his gardening team has anything to do with it.

The animation functionality it pretty simple: you set the keyframes and the program will generate a smooth set of tween frames. The animation you see above is a result of 6 keyframes. I've added a short animation creation to the tutorial to the README.

I'd love to get some feedback from anyone who installs this even if you hate it, tell me.

And now I'm going to bed, good night.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Newer versions of Skippy, my GIF writing library, have the ability to save animated GIFs, and it's pure lisp (no need to call ImageMagick). I'll take a look at integrating it with IFS Designer.

Also, it's a little unfriendly to have a tarball that expands into many different directories...

Xach said...

I use SBCL, and while the GUI works, "IFS > Generate IFS" generates a lot of noise in the repl but doesn't, as far as I can tell, do anything. :(

charlieb said...

Thanks for taking a look at the IFS designer. The reason I only supported single frame bmps in this release is that sdl nicely provides a function to dump an sdl surface to a file. I had used cl-gd but it was sloooooooow.
You are quite right about the multiple directories, in fact the matrix lib shouldn't be available in its own right anyway and shouldn't claim to be a complete matrix lib anyway. I will integrate them into a single package.
As for sbcl I've found that the sdl library is a bit flakey at times under sbcl. I'm downloading it now and I'll give it a test. I use cmucl but I should support sbcl as well.