jmdavis@cbnewsd.ATT.COM (j.michael.davis) (09/01/89)
I recently had a chance to play extensively with the Performer from Elan
Design. I found it lacking in the sound and multitasking dispatching areas,
but otherwise found the program quite good.
The user interface is straight forward. You select a key and then load either
an animation or a picture into that key. After you have several anims and/or
pictures associated with the keys you can play them by just pressing the appro
key. The program animates the animations and displays the pictures. The
transitions are clean and quick. You can specify different playback rates for
each of the animations.
However, there is no provision for sound, desite what the back of the box
says. Their recommended way of using sound is to get a sound program running
in parallel with theirs. Of course, synchronism is a problem here. It would
have been great if the performer allowed you to load sounds into some keys
and allowed you to play sounds at the same time as showing pictures or anims.
Also, as some friends have pointed out, Elan Design should have allowed you
to dispatch a CLI process by hitting a key. This general idea would add great
flexibility to the program as in "When I hit this key, execute this shell
program.".
You can do more with the Director, but this program has the advantage of
being easy to use and some of the "advanced" Performer features (like being
able to play anims backward and forward as well as dynamically altering the
frame rate) would be difficult to program on the Director.
SUMMARY: Definitely worth the $45 or so that we paid for it (bought it for a
friend) if you don't have the Director. May be worth it if you do have the
Director and an anim project in mind. BUT IT COULD HAVE BEEN A MUCH BETTER
PROGRAM.
--
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I am just about fed up | Mike Davis
and I will only take it | ..!att!ihlpm!jmdavis
a few more times. |