Yesterday I completed the first test animation for Interference, and it all worked. I made a few tweaks to the program to add a few new features. One is that the render time of the last animation is now stored, in case that's important. Interference took about 7 minutes to render, almost all of that time is saving out the bmp files - the actual calculations are as good as instant. The 4500 frame animation then took FreeMake 40 minutes to process - far longer than I'd hoped. I wonder if changing the format from bmp to jpg (in Irfanview?) would this up, but I don't know, it just seems to take ages to create a film from raw frames.
A few small changes to Argus over the past few days. Today I've looked at adding support for full-scene anti-aliasing, but it seems that this really only works for polygon edges, not for textures which is all I care about. Some anti-aliasing would be nice as the scaling down looks a bit jaggy on a per-pixel basis. I can make up for this by blurring the textures a little. I can't render larger and then reduce (although I thought about rendering to an off-screen surface - this might be possible).
I've added a separate value for millisecs-per-frame, which is used for live playback. Weirdly, my animation is exactly in sync with the music at 25 millisecs per frame, when the animation is designed for 30 frames per second (which is 33.3333 millisecs per frame). I don't know why. The exact 1/3 ratio seems too much of a coincidence - but anyway, the playback speed can now be set independently of the actual frames-per-second rate in the sequencer. This might be useful for issues just like this. Sometimes you might want to change the live preview speed but not mess around with the animation frame rate, which is there to return the correct timing in the sequencer anyway.
Other changes: I've added the ability to process bitmasks on an Actor/Track level, and added new quick-load options for Modulators, and a context menu there.
I'm amazed how well it's all working, generally.
The first test film will appear live on my music channel tonight.
It's too hot and this make work unpleasant. My stress levels have been too high and I think it's all down to programming. I just can't cope with programming - I'm almost allergic to it. I grew to hate it in the early 2000s and it causes me problems like a disease; it's such an intense and demanding process. I'm pleased now though to never have to program games again! Only Prometheus, Argus and my tools will ever need programming.
I must avoid tweaking forever. How many test animations need doing before the program should be considered complete? Perhaps by tomorrow... a Friday.
