A full day's work on Argus, my animation software, today, largely with very little to show for it, lost of tidying the code, adding lots of defines that should have been in Prometheus, if I had programmed that today. Mostly working out the G.U.I.; which icons need designing, layouts of windows and creating/destroying a few necessary structures and making sure it works, which has taken many hours.
My main issue with how it works now concerns how to load objects with multiple textures; one texture per frame. All of my 3D work until now used only one texture per object, never several. Any texture animation would have been done with a strip effect, although I've rarely animated objects anyway; only in Taskforce and perhaps, Trax, I can't remember. These need to be loaded whenever entering the 3D mode, and freed when exiting it. They can't be saved in 'film files' or included in data structures, only the filenames can, so it makes everything a bit complicated, with a unique filename and filepath per frame, as well as system objects like the mouse pointer, which is also 3D. I think this is is the last remaining hurdle to solve.
Also watched Dambusters, an almost 3-hour film, and reminded how good it is; and how similar to Star Wars. The tension as the bombers take off for their mission is considerably greater than the tension before the Death Star raid.
