J.F. Rick wrote:
Athens graphics are fast enough that it is possible to do high
frame-rate animations. I've been trying (and, to various degrees,
succeeding) in adding animations to my touch applications. I'm using
stepping to do it. Basically, you just move pieces / update the
display when step gets called. If you set the stepTime to 30, you
should get somewhere around 30 frames per second, which is quite smooth.
The problem I have is that the step mechanism in Pharo seems to block
out the UI thread. In Squeak, you could return 0 for the stepTime
message and then step would get called each UI cycle. In Pharo, the
two seem to be disconnected. If the stepTime is too low, the processor
will be busy doing redrawing and the UI loop is stopped. When I do
stepTime of 20, the UI stops responding until after the animation is
over. When I do stepTime of 50, the UI keeps working. The lower the
stepTime, the smoother the animation, but also the chance that the UI
becomes unresponsive. That's a nasty tradeoff. Is there a good way to
do step style animation without this tradeoff? Why was stepping and
the UI loop separated? Is there a different way that animation should
be implemented?
Cheers,
Jeff
--
Jochen "Jeff" Rick, Ph.D.
http://www.je77.com/
Skype ID: jochenrick
What came out of
http://gsoc2013.esug.org/projects/athens-animation ?