Newest Entries are on the Recent Entries page.

Wednesday, 31st May 2006 (evening)

Investigated the SVG 1.1 spec and found out that "square" isn't a possible value for the stroke-linejoin attribute. Not sure where I'd gotten it from.  ;) Updated the SVG output from Flame to use correct values instead, and now Opera 9 loads the output correctly with 0 issues at all (yay). Now I just need to get the font side of things working, then figure out some kind of playback controls.

Also tried out Squiggle, the SVG player that comes with the often-mentioned Batik (v1.6). While it loads its own SVG examples (all SVG 1.0) nicely, it can't seem to load any SVG that Flame creates. Took about an hour manually reworking some of Flame's output to cater to Squiggle's reported error messages, but still no luck. Verdict thus far: Squiggle is not very impressive. :(

Wednesday, 31st May 2006 (morning)

After some investigation, found out that Opera has an error console and it was dutifully reporting the problems it had with Flame's SVG there. Turns out I was misunderstanding how the keyTimes attribute worked. Now fixed, and playback works correctly in Opera 9.0 beta 2. Looks to still be a minor issue with the stroke-linejoin attribute, hopefully also easy to fix. :)

Also released a new development snapshot (windows) including the above change:

 http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=58083&package_id=53841&release_id=421197 

Tuesday, 30th May 2006

Found out why the registry writing code wouldn't overwrite already written entries. Simple bitmask thing, now fixed. The windows registry writing appears to all work, so I've bumped the version number to 0.7.5 to show progress.  :)

Also released a new development snapshot (windows). This one includes all the new code for saving preferences to the registry and load them when starting up:

 http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=58083&package_id=53841&release_id=421051 

As a word of warning, I've just downloaded Opera beta 2. It appears broken, as it won't display inline images that beta 1 played fine. Anyone know how to report bugs to the Opera team?

Monday, 29th May 2006

• Added initial working Windows Registry code, to load default application values if stored there. Took a bit of effort getting the first calls sorted out, but after that it was pretty simple. :)
• Also added initial working code to save default application values in the windows registry. Needs a bit more work though as it appears to be saving only the first time the program exits, not on subsequent exits.

Sunday, 28th May 2006

The output resolution selector is now recreated each time a project is loaded, and automatically includes whichever resolution was specified in the project file. Can be useful for hand-adjusting a saved project file (its text!) with a new res, then loading it and creating the output at the new resolution. :)

Compiled and pushed out a new windows development snapshot too, with these latest changes:

 http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=58083&package_id=53841&release_id=420531 (Compiled windows version)

Wednesday, 24th May 2006

Updated the output selector creation function to dynamically include a new resolution if required. Almost ready to fix the project loading code to use it. :)

Compiled and pushed out a new windows development snapshot too. SVG output should be tested in Opera 9, as neither ASV3 nor Firefox do very well with it. If someone comes across another player that supports enough of the SVG spec, please let me know and I'll happily try it. :)

 http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=58083&package_id=53841&release_id=419563 (Compiled windows version)

Tuesday, 23rd May 2006

Added a 160x120 output resolution, just in case people designing mobile or other small form factor content want to try Flame out.  :)

Identified a small bug that's a bit of a pain to fix. When loading a saved project, the saved output width and height gets set internally, but the resolution selected on the display isn't updated. Turns out it's harder to fix properly than it sounds. Heh.

However, I'm working on it, so the internals have been changed around to create the output resolution selection from a list rather than use hard coded strings. This prepares things so I can add a resolution loaded from a project to the list (if it's not already there for some reason), etc. :)

Monday, 22nd May 2006

Object movement and fades now work correctly for SVG output. Yay. :) After taking a look at the W3C example:

http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/animate.html#Animation.classExample 

Adjusted the code to use the "animate" format for the X, Y, and opacity values like the example, and Voila, playback occurs correctly on Opera 9.0b.

Firefox 1.5 barely displays anything because it doesn't like starting opacity values of 0. Might have to develop a workaround (if possible), but I don't have high hopes just yet.

Tried ASV3, and it displays everything fine except for the images. It doesn't like inline image data. :(

All the new code is in CVS. Will likely make a new installable binary this weekend for people to try things out with.

Sunday, 21st May 2006

• Trying out the animateMotion keyword in the svg output. Can't see much difference (i.e. needs more work), but it feels like the right way forward.
• Trying out a new way of calculating font size in the svg output, and it's looking better already.

Saturday, 20th May 2006

• Fixed a bug in the gconf calling code that was causing a realloc crash. This means the recent crashing on Linux wasn't caused by my recent upgrade to Gnome 2.14, and I can now keep continue coding on Linux. :)
• Added svg output tags to move the highlight and text layers into their final positions over the course of each slide.
• Fixed several places where I was using the wrong call to free memory, leading to potential crashing bugs.

Also added a very simple project for download in case it's helpful:

 http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=58083&package_id=191294&release_id=418458 

This is one I whipped up for testing out new output features. It consists of one slide with a background image, foreground image, text layer, and highlight layer.

It needs to be either:

a) extracted to c:\flame

or

b) after extracting elsewhere, modify the project file in the "projects" subdirectory with a text editor, manually changing the path names to suit.

Turns out that path names are hard coded in project files... I'll have to make things a bit more flexible down the track. ;)

Thursday, 18th May 2006

Added svg output properties to move image layers to their final positions during the animation. Only in CVS at present.

Wednesday, 17th May 2006

Made a lot of improvements to the timing of objects and slides in the svg export, so now they'll appear and disappear correctly. Bumped up the version number to 0.7.4 to mark this. Haven't added the movement of objects whilst they're onscreen just yet, it's coming.

New compiled snapshot for Windows, this time including the libxml and libungif libraries with the installation so you shouldn't need to install them first yourself:

 http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=58083&package_id=53841&release_id=417520 

Please email me with feedback, especially for any dependencies other than GTK (which I think is the only thing left). I'll try and figure out how to fix things for the next snapshot.

Tuesday, 16th May 2006

Started adding code to properly calculate and include the timing of slides for the SVG export option, but Eclipse is giving me troubles. It's telling me about glibc detecting invalid realloc()'s, even when I revert to completely known-good versions of the code.

Probably related to my upgrading my desktop system on the weekend to include some stuff marked as "testing", so I could try out Gnome 2.14. Might have to revert back to Gnome 2.12. :(

Monday, 15th May 2006

Added some #ifdefs so Gnome functions aren't used on windows. Using the gnome libraries there just pulls in more dependencies than is practical (my opinion). Will probably have to find native windows functions for sound playing and url loading.

Sunday, 14th May 2006

SourceForge's new CVS servers are online, so all the recent changes have been committed. Good thing I keep my own repository, as SourceForge had lost some of the most recent commits (which needed to be redone).

Also made a first installer for Windows, but its dependencies are huge. You'll need a working GTK+ installation, libxml2, and libungif, just to get it to run:

 http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=58083&package_id=53841&release_id=416722 

Saturday, 13th May 2006

Now keeps track of the last file name used in a session, and makes that the default name for opening and saving of files.

Thursday, 11th May 2006

Excellent news! Tried the generated SVG output with Opera - version 9 preview release 2, and it works really well. The fades aren't smooth, but at least they appear and disappear properly, and inline image content works too (unlike ASV3). Works better than Mozilla 1.5 and ASV3. Whew. :)

Added further code to CVS repository, but SourceForge's CVS is still down. They're saying they'll have it fixed this week or so.

• Added working 1 second fade in and out code for image layers to the SVG export.

Wednesday, 10th May 2006

Added more code to my local CVS repository, but CVS on SourceForge is still unworking (grrr).

• Changed the inline image data format for SVG from PNG to jpeg, as Firefox has less issues with jpeg.
• Added working 1 second fade in and out code for text layers to the SVG export. This also works in ASV3, but not Firefox. Haven't tried Opera yet.

Tuesday, 9th May 2006

Added code (to my local CVS repository), but CVS on SourceForge isn't working (yet again) so I'll have to commit it tomorrow.

• Added working 1 second fade in and fade out code for highlights to the SVG export. It works in ASV3 (Adobe SVG Viewer 3), but not Firefox. (Ugh)
• Added an overwrite warning dialog when attempting to overwrite an existing exported Flash file.

Monday, 8th May 2006

Added a warning dialog box to the SVG Export when overwriting an existing file.

Saturday, 6th May 2006

Added initial semi-working code to output the actual text component for SVG exporting. Needs work.

Friday, 5th May 2006

Improved the SVG output code to draw layers in the correct order and also scale the highlight and text background boxes to the rest of the scene.

Tuesday, 2nd May 2006

Fixed a bug in the project loading code, where the values weren't being transferred through to the layer area.

Monday, 1st May 2006

Added initial code for the SVG output of highlight layers. Needs a bit more work, to ensure the dimensions are in scale with the rest of the elements.