Kirill Grouchnikov talks about the origins of his series of animations posts and looks ahead in his latest post Animations - footnotes. First, how did the series come about?
The animation series that was published on this blog last week has been largely the product of reworking the animation layer in Substance look-and-feel and replacing it with the Trident animation library.
So, when some people posted comments asking if they could see actual code that implements the laws of motion and other aspects of animation that Kirill was presenting, the response was that much of the code exists in the upcoming versions of Kirill's open source projects, specifically Trident, which is being integrated into Substance. But, since this is new code, developers who have existing applications that use these open source libraries may need to make some modifications to their apps, in order to take advantage of the new animation features:
If you're using Substance look-and-feel library in your applications, you will need to add the matching Trident jar to your classpath – starting from release 6.0 of Substance. The matching Trident version is 1.2 and it will be officially released at the same time with Substance 6.0. While this is not a major Trident release, it does remove deprecated APIs and as such will break applications that are using those APIs. All the removed APIs have direct replacements, and the final release notes will provide additional information (if you cannot find it in the code). The final Trident 1.2 / Substance 6.0 releases are scheduled for March-April 2010 timeframe.
Suppose it takes 500ms to complete a single animation. The user moves the mouse over a button, and Substance starts animating the color from light blue to light yellow. Halfway through the animation (250ms), the user presses the button. Now, there are three states participating in the animation: default with light blue, rollover with light yellow and pressed with saturated orange. All the states contribute to the overall appearance of the button as long as the combined animation is in progress.
This brings up a very important issue for any application that applies animation: processing time and display time. A problem I've seen many times arises because developers tend to develop on fairly high-end computers, which are often much faster and more powerful than the computers that many users of the applications work on. This can lead to the development of complex animations that work very well on the developer's own system, but which bog down a user's system, which lacks the resources to perform the necessary computations and display the results in an adequate time frame, resulting in choppy, halting animations on the user's computer.
As Kirill noted early in the series, you probably have only one chance, and it's probably limited to less than a minute, to impress a new user. If you've created something that can only run properly on a high-end developer's system, but you're selling your application to a wide user base (perhaps through the Java Store), you've got to be careful not to let the excitement that comes with creating dazzling displays on your own system carry you away -- if, that is, your objective is broad distribution of your app.
Where this can become a real problem is situations where you have large numbers of animated objects all working within as single field of view. If all users had N-core computers (where N is the number of simultaneouly animated objects your app manages), it probably wouldn't be a problem. But even today, you have to assume that many users still have older single processor computers. If widespread distribution is your goal, I think you need to ensure that your application runs well on computers that were fairly mainstream in the consumer market 3-4 years ago.
Anyway, Kirill's animations series, which started with Animations 101 - from point A to point B, illustrated the complexity of real-world movement and state transitions. In Animations - footnotes, Kirill notes that a lot of work remains with respect to coding everything that was discussed in the series:
The current implementation of the multi-state transitions in Substance 6.0dev does not model most of the physical laws discussed in this series. Handling momentum / inertia, direction change involving smooth turns, and the matching velocity models are not implemented. The work on this will continue throughout 2010, and some of it might find its way to the Trident itself. I am not aware of any other animation library (Java based or otherwise) that provides out-of-the-box support even for simple animations based on the physical rules discussed in this series.
My guess is that volunteers who would like to assist in the effort will be welcomed!
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