A hot day, a constant 25.5 degrees in my room which is almost the limit I can tolerate, or at least, feel safe with.
A good day for Argus though. I decided to create a first animation, a test. I found a few bugs; I fixed a null pointer bug in the alpha. Fixed the modulators, which when at the end used to behave as though 'off' when they should stay at the end (if something 'fades' with a slope, it should stay faded rather than jump back up at the end of the modulator. I added the option to enable or disable z-buffering on a per-object basis. I was confused that objects in the lower part of the list were not printing on top of those above - the answer was simple, they were literally behind them on in the z-axis. So everything is working.
The results so far have amazed me, instantly better than anything I've made in AVISynth. I started by rendering a simple 45-frame animation of expanding circles, and used these, when converted to dds, as source textures. This didn't take as long as I thought, it involved using the batch option in Irfanview.
I've made many more tweaks - adding the auto-name and auto-delete functions for the modulators, adding an optional transparency for the (often unused) mouse cursor. I've also added the option to add events given a comma delimited list of frame numbers, this will allow me to exactly synchronise Prometheus music. The live music synchronisation doesn't really work, the video doesn't keep accurate pace for some reason.
But apart from that, all is good so far and the testing is proceeding. Here's an image from the first animation test:
It's due to be thundery tomorrow, a bit risky for programming. I keep feeling unnaturally stressed, perhaps worried that I'll break the software or find a bug - when, actually, everything has worked remarkably well so far. I might avoid computer work due to storm fears.
I'm aching to be creative. These past few weeks, making Argus, have been productive for me, but how has this benefitted the world? Only in the work I can make with Argus. It's so fast to use, I could make an animation like one of David Lynch's Dumbland, or a Terry Gilliam animation in a day, I expect. I could probably make an animated series in that fashion in a week or two.
