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From: ebergman@isis.cs.du.edu (Eric Bergman-Terrell)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms.programmer
Subject: Animation w/ Win 3.0?
Message-ID: <1991Feb28.230407.8337@isis.cs.du.edu>
Date: 28 Feb 91 23:04:07 GMT
Reply-To: ebergman@isis.UUCP (Eric Bergman-Terrell)
Organization: Nyx -- Public access Unix, U. of Denver, dept. of Math/CS
Lines: 34


I have an MS-DOS application that does animation using the multiple graphics
pages of EGA/VGA cards.  The program draws a picture to an invisible page,
then makes that page visible, then draws the next picture to an invisible
page, etc.

The result is crisp animation.

So how can this be done in Windows 3.0?  Petzold's book says that Windows
doesn't really support animation, but is there a method of doing acceptable
one frame at a time animation?

Which (if any) of the following schemes are viable:

1.	For each frame, open a metafile, do all the graphics primitives,
	close the metafile and display it.  Will this be fast enough for
	a moderately complex frame?

2.	Hand craft graphics primitives (line, ellipse, etc) that draw
	into a bitmap (i.e. set bits in a bitmap).  For each frame, get a
	blank bitmap, draw into it with the hand crafted primitives, then
	bitblt it to the screen.  This seems rather painful!

3.	Wait for the "multimedia extensions" in a subsequent version of 
	Windows.


Anyway, I'm looking forward to your opinions and suggestions.


Eric Bergman-Terrell

P.S. I have Borland C++ for Windows, and will probably get Turbo Pascal
for Windows when it comes out...