Re: Animating clips (tracks in SVG?)

Mark,
Your email has been submitted to the SVG WG for discussion.

One response I will make is relative to your comment about adding a special 
SVG element to your viewer to provide a feature not available in the SVG 
language. Are you implementing SVG Tiny, SVG Basic or SVG Full, and are you 
targeting 1.1 or 1.2? The reason for asking is that SVG 1.2 has several new 
features which might help you out. One feature in particular is sXBL in SVG 
Full 1.2. One of the things we are currently planning to deliver via sXBL 
in SVG Full 1.2 is the ability to define custom animations. For example, 
you could define a <MyNamespace:AnimatedColoredCircle> custom element which 
could act as you describe below. You can also create 
<MyNamespace:BouncingObject> or <MyNamespace:ShimmerEffect>.

One disadvantage that you have being a member of the public rather than a 
member of the SVG WG is that you have to rely on public drafts. So far, 
custom animation features using sXBL haven't been documented sufficiently 
(or even mentioned?) in any public drafts. However, this feature might make 
it into a public draft fairly soon. Stay tuned and watch this email list 
for announcements of new drafts of SVG 1.2. The SVG WG is working very hard 
right now to publish a new and comprehensive draft of SVG 1.2 fairly 
shortly (we hope).

Jon Ferraiolo
Adobe Systems, Inc.
Member SVG Working Group
co-editor sXBL specification


At 06:54 PM 10/5/2004, Mark McKay wrote:

>I'm developing a new SVG viewer and player in Java. 
>(http://svgsalamander.dev.java.net).  The viewer portion is working,
>and I'm currently working on animation.  Since my original intention
>was to produce an SVG viewer/player that was particularly useful for
>video games,  I'm paying attention to the animation features.
>
>Looking over the SVG specification, it seems to me there is no ability
>to create clips of animation.  The only way I can think of to create
>things such as walk cycles, bouncing ball cycles, buttons with shimmers
>that slide across them or other complex repetative animation with SVG are 
>kludges involving creating events to keep reseting the begining times of 
>animate elements.
>
>For example, is there an easy way in SVG to create a circle that is
>initially red for 2s, then changes to yellow over 5s, then pauses for 2s,
>then fades to green over 5s, then pauses 2s, then fades back to red? 
>(Let's call this complete animation a track).  Can I then repeat the
>track as a unit?  Can I stop and start this track as a unit?  Can I define 
>this in the <defs> block and have a <use> tag create several instances of 
>it in different parts of the screen?  With different time 
>offsets?  Perhaps speeding up or slowing down?
>
>If SVG doesn't support this notion of tracks, would it make sense for
>me to create a special tag for my viewer to support this?
>
>Mark McKay
>--
>http://www.kitfox.com
>
>

Received on Wednesday, 6 October 2004 16:46:13 UTC