The Animator Applet

The Animator applet is a general purpose animation tool. It has these features:

you can specify an order to the frames, which lets you reuse them
you can specify whether the animation repeats
you can specify a soundtrack
you can specify sounds to be played with individual frames
you can specify the amount of time to pause between frames (both on the animation as a whole and on individual frames)
you can specify a startup image to display while loading
you can specify a background image upon which to display the animation
you can specify a position at which to display each frame

Please try out the Animator applet for your own animations and let us know what you think. Here's the source code. You can save it by bringing up the View Source window for it, and clicking the Save button. Then just compile it and try it out.

Note: You can't compile this applet under 1.0Alpha2 -- only under 1.0beta.

The Animator applet isn't finished -- we plan to add more features -- but we'd appreciate your suggestions. Send bug reports and feature requests to java@java.sun.com.

Tag Syntax

<APP CLASS="Animator"
     IMAGESOURCE="aDirectory"       -- the directory that has the animation
				       frames (a series of pictures in GIF
				       format, named T1.gif, T2.gif, ...)
     STARTUP="aFile"		    -- an image to display at load time
     BACKGROUND="aFile"		    -- an image to paint the frames against
     STARTIMAGE="aNumber"	    -- number of the starting frame (1..n)
     ENDIMAGE="aNumber" 	    -- number of the end frame (1..n)
     PAUSE="100"	  	    -- milliseconds to pause between images
				       default - can be overriden by PAUSES)
     PAUSES="300|200||400|200||100" -- millisecond delay per frame.  Blank
				       uses default PAUSE value
     REPEAT="true"	            -- repeat the sequence?
     POSITIONS="100@200||200@100||200@200|100@100|105@105"
				    -- positions (X@Y) for each frame.  Blank
				       means use previous frame's position
     IMAGES="3|3|2|1|2|3|17"        -- explicit order for frames - see below
     SOUNDSOURCE="aDirectory"       -- the directory that has the audio files
     SOUNDTRACK="aFile"		    -- an audio file to play throughout
     SOUNDS="aFile.au|||||bFile.au" -- audio files keyed to individual frames
>

The IMAGES, STARTIMAGE, and ENDIMAGE parameters

You can specify either an IMAGES list or a STARTIMAGE/ENDIMAGE range, but not both. The IMAGES list is a string of frame numbers in the order in which you wish them to display, separated by vertical bars.

STARTIMAGE and ENDIMAGE let you specify a range of images. Specifying an ENDIMAGE that is numerically less than the STARTIMAGE will display the images in reverse order. Both parameters have default values of 1, so specifying only STARTIMAGE="15" means "play the frames in reverse order from 15 to 1." Saying only ENDIMAGE="13" means "play the frames from 1 to 13." Of course, you can use both STARTIMAGE and ENDIMAGE together.

Herb Jellinek | jellinek@eng.sun.com