MainActor is a full featured animation program. You can create / edit / time / play animations of any size on your native amiga chipset or your graphic card (if supported). Features ======== - Intelligent caching/tracking, MainActor can cache your animations and picture lists, if you have not enough memory it will directly access your data from any device. This makes it for example possible to create/edit/play a 400MB animation on your 2MB Amiga. - If you run OS 3.0 or higher, you will get an extra speed bonus on animations by the use of the new graphic routines. For OS2.0/2.1 users there are specific routines in the modules, which will give them the best playback speed possible on their system (and my knowledge :)). - Under OS 3.0 you will get the extra features of showing pictures or playing animations in a scrollable, resizable window on your MainActor or Workbench screen. The colors will be properly adjusted to your screen attributes. - The modules have play routines of their own, so it will be possible to redirect the input/output of special modules to graphic boards or other hardware. - The play routines support a timecode per frame option. A sound module (per frame) option will be there in one of the next releases. - MainActor has a totally user reconfigureable GUI. The settings of your sessions can be saved, this includes the size/position of windows as well as the status of the projects. - MainActor has an arexx port, nearly all functions can be accessed through it. You can for example scale or dither whole animations on the fly through the use of an image processor, scripts are included. - MainActor lets you setup and save nearly everything concerning the display mode for playing an animation or showing a picture. For example you can set the X/Y offsets, the display mode ID of your screen (view) and so on. - MainActor supports localization (wb 2.1+ required). - You can now map your arexx scripts to the function keys. - New IFF-Anim8_32, IFF-Anim8_16, PCX modules. - The new Universal modules allow you to easily load all of the supported graphic formats. The Universal_Picasso-II modules remap the output of all modules directly to the Picasso-II graphics board from Village Tronic. - MainActor now has a powerful external player named 'MainView', it can view all animations/pictures for which MainActor has the proper loader module. It is executeable from the Workbench or CLI and supports, per tooltypes or CLI arguments, all of MainActors view options. - MainActor now (optionally) saves icons for your newly created animations or pictures, enabling you to view the animations/pictures by selecting their icons. These icons support the same tooltypes as MainView. - You can now control how many times MainActor/MainView plays animations. - The new 'Flash' option allows you to profile your animations. - MainActor/MainView now have a center option which allows highly accurate centration of your images or animations. - New BorderBlank option. - MainActor has a new window called Project Information Window. The new functions included in the window are: * An information window which will give you detailed descriptions of your current animation or picture list. * You can now view the size and time profiles of your projects as a graphical representation. * You can compare the decompression times of your projects through new timer functions. - New GIF/FLI/FLC/DL loader modules and FLI/FLC saver modules. - Chunky pixel modules (GIF/FLI/FLC) will fly if loaded through universal modules which support graphic cards (like Universal_PicassoII etc.). You can of course also view them on your native chipset as normal. - Introduction of a new (light) registration package. It does not have the handbook or the disk based updates but is cheaper. - You can now use the save/append functions again, even if you have not registered MainActor. You will have to deal with requesters though. - Major hd playback improvements of all modules. Average speed increase is about 2 - 5 times the speed of v1.2, giving you maximum performance. - Sound Support. MainActor now has Sound Modules which allow you to associate sound effects to every frame of an animation. This works for pictures too. The sound information is module independent, that means that you could use the same sound information ("#?.snd") on every module type MainActor supports. - New Real3D, IFF-Anim3, IFF-AnimJ, Picasso and AVI animation loader. - The usage of the Append function is now easier. The saver module now recognizes automatically if the destination project is of the right type. That means that you can now use the universal modules for appending. ** HARD DRIVE REQUIRED ** ** NOW INCLUDES UPDATE PATCH **