Re: Deconstructing animations

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Sun, 2003-06-29 at 15:25, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> Am Son, 2003-06-29 um 20.25 schrieb Havoc Pennington:
> > On Sun, Jun 29, 2003 at 07:43:32PM +0200, Matthias Clasen wrote: 
> > > No. All I want is a way to collect the sequence of pixbufs (and delays)
> > > which I can get via a GdkPixbufAnimationIter, without running into
> > > loops. I don't see how this would be giving up anything. Even mng
> > > ultimatively results in a sequence of frames which are displayed one
> > > after the other. 
> > 
> > Right, but it results in an infinite resolution series of frames. 
> > i.e. I believe the format has things like "move sprite from point A to
> > point B over N seconds"
> > 
> 
> Well, GdkPixbufAnimationIter certainly doesn't give me "infinite
> resolution". It's resolution is limited to 1frame/ms since the delay is 
> reported as an integral number of milliseconds. Anyway, I think it would
> be more useful to discuss the concrete api proposal I have made: lets
> add
> 
> gint
> gdk_animation_iter_get_loop (GdkPixbufAnimationIter *iter);
> 
> which would return how many complete loops the iter has already made
> over the animation. You may object that one can conceive implementation
> of GdkPixbufAnimation which produce an infinite number of frames without
> ever repeating one...but in that case, it would be fine to just return 0
> forever. Anybody harvesting frames from an animation would certainly be
> sane enough to stop after having collected a few hours worth of frames
> without coming to the end of the first loop...

Maybe just me but I dislike this. The whole idea of harvesting frames
by advancing the animation iter strikes me as very messy... 
GdkPixbufAnimationIter is, by it's very nature, a pointer into a 
continuous sequence. If we want to be able to view some animations
as sequences of frames we should make that explicit.

Regard,
						Owen