The Future of Animation in LiveCode

[Bjoernke von Gierke]

I agree that additional features like SVG import or access to a phyiscs engine would make things possible that are now not possible. In a similar vein, multimedia problems like the slowness of using gifs for animated images, as well as the general lack of movie format support could be addressed to make some things easier or possible to begin with.

One of the main problems however will not be fixed in the foreseeable future, or possibly ever: LC can't enforce animation times. Namely it's not possible to force a screen redraw, or other actions, based on a timer, ignoring wether previous calculations have finished or not. In LC, all timers simply laps when there's too much processing, which means that any animation with more then 10-20 moving parts is impossible to keep in frame, and therefore impossible to make not lag.

Now it is of course possible to just create laggy animated games, or games where animation lag has no consequences besides production value. But for most simple games that _depend_ on animation, like shooters (Asteroids, shmups) or jump'n run (Super Mario, Flappy Bird), lagginess will kill the gameplay. Those games will therefore remain to be impossible to make with LC in the foreseeable future.



> On 11 Feb 2015, at 15:09, Curry Kenworthy <curry at pair.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> People have been making games and some types of animation with LC/RR for over a decade, and progress will continue. No barriers if you choose the right project and build around the features.
> 
> My nerve disease acts up during winter and makes it harder to type or talk, so releasing updates such as FT and WordLib will keep me busy for a while.
> 
> But later this year I would like to start a game with current graphics, either for a client or for myself.
> 
> Last year I did an LC 6 app containing animation and it ran acceptably even on the weakest Android hardware. And some Full HD testing to check LC game worthiness had decent results. LC's got the mojo.
> 
> Best wishes,
> 
> Curry Kenworthy



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