Control ActiveX that recreates FLI animations

Extends possibilities of flic-file animation by adding the facilities of sprite-based transparent rendering (including playback direct to the Desktop) and pre-rendering of animations for maximum playback speed.

Changes

• Extends possibilities of flic-file animation by adding the facilities of sprite-based transparent rendering (including playback direct to the Desktop) and pre-rendering of animations for maximum playback speed.

The Dragon FlicPlayer System consists of a pair of 32-bit components for Borland Delphi versions 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6, which replicate and extend the functionality of the 16-bit AAPLAY.DLL flic-playing DLL provided by Autodesk Inc. for the playback of animation files produced with Autodesk Animator, Animator Pro and Animator Studio.

The Dragon FlicPanel is a visual component which acts as a “wrapper” for the FlicPlayer32 component. It provides its own canvas for displaying animations, but can also play back animations transparently to other windows and direct to the Desktop.

Flic-file animations are ideal for rendering the “cartoon” style of animations which are used extensively in Computer Based Training and multimedia applications. They can also be used in place of animated GIF images, where they typically result in a file size which is 50% – 70% of the GIF version of an animation. The components are written in pure 32-bit Delphi, and use a combination of Device Independent Bitmaps (DIBs), ImageLists, dynamic arrays, streams and multi-threading for optimal performance.