Dr. Dobb's Journal July 1998

Models versus Presentations

Here is a rough sketch of the steps you usually go through to program an animation:

Allocate and initialize window, various drawing surfaces and bitmaps 

  repeat until quit: 
	
	get time ( t) 

	clear back buffer 

	for each sprite (back to front): 

	compute position, scale, etc. at t 

	draw to back buffer 

	fast copy ("blit") back buffer to front 

  Flip back buffer to the screen 

Deallocate bitmaps, drawing surfaces, window

These steps are usually carried out with lots of tedious, low-level code you have to write yourself. Most of this work is not about what the animation is, but how to present it. In contrast, Fran programs are only about what the animation is.

-- C.E.

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