Product: ANIMATOR1
Producer: Softcat Micros, PO Box 79, Macclesfield, Cheshire, SK10 3NP TEL: 0625 615379
Author: D. Latham
Retail Price: £14.95
Compatible with Spectrum 48K, PLUS and 128

GETTING THINGS MOVING ON SCREEN

A brand new utility arrived in the office, and FRANCO FREY had some fun moving things round his Spectrum's screen ... THE ANIMATOR, from Softcat Micros:

ART STUDIO has been living the high life amongst the latest crop of drawing utilities. It seemed nothing could really match it for elegance and ease of use, plethora of facilities and up to date software technology.

Now a program from a relatively unknown software house has arrived to challenge that very position. ANIMATOR1 from Softcat Micros claims to be the ultimate graphics development tool for programmers and artists. In one fell swoop it brushes aside the fancy icon-come-window technique and makes the use of the fashionable mouse completely redundant. Can it be that ART STUDIO has been so quickly dethroned?

THE INGREDIENTS

ANIMATOR1 was originally designed as an up to date sprite designer as opposed to the many programs currently on the market such as ART STUDIO, THE ARTIST and AMX ART, which are all basically screen designers. ANIMATOR1 provides a sprite window for your sprite designs which can be set to any size. Using the Sprite Menu the sprites can be designed, stored, retrieved and animated through this window. This is equivalent in concept to the defunct PAINT program by Procom and its subsequent derivations such as PAINT PLUS and SCREEN DESIGNER from Print'n'Plotter, but ANIMATOR1 is far more flexible.

Any sprite size can be selected and the number of frames is limited only by the size of memory in combination with the size of your sprite(s). Sprites can be saved in BASIC or machine code format, and the BASIC driver program is unprotected and 'hackable'. The whole screen can be used as a sprite sketch pad, so individual frame stages can be drawn side by side and saved individually by specifying the sprite number. Animation is accomplished by indicating the relevant sprite numbers to appear in the sequence and the sprite action can roll.

With its wealth of facilities and functions, ANIMATOR1 is also ideal as a screen designer. The most outstanding aspect is the versatile magnify window, which apart from being set on and off displays any part of the screen and can be relocated anywhere 'out of the way' on the screen. It is even active in animation mode, so detailed animation work can be viewed concurrent to the normal sprite animation.

For screen design there is an amazing amount of facilities. Paint brushes, air brushes and hatches (textures) can be redesigned, elastic fast tag, fixed line and circle modes are available, as well as shade paint capability, walk over colour control, 25 different scroll, rotate and mirrors and stretch and compression of the whole screen.

ANIMATOR1 features an amazing text print facility. It prints text in any size, shape and angle by distorting the character set. The text can be located by seizing it and moving it around like a brush.

Character sets and UDG's can be designed together with hatches, paint brushes and air brushes using the Design Menu. Up to 15K of memory is available.

THE RECIPE

All functions are controlled using the keyboard. This means memorising all the key sequences necessary to perform the various activities. Full use is made of the keyboard shift facilities and the commands are grouped by function under the individual shift 'families'. The V shift group controls the magnify window position and activeness, the Z shift the fine scrolls of the screen, the X shift the attribute scroll, rotates and mirrors, the C shift the course screen scroll, rotates and mirrors and the Caps shift group contains most of the screen design functions. Brush control is also by keyboard with a Q-A and O-P cursor. For joystick addicts a programmable joystick interface such as the COMCON is the only escape from this keyboard madness. New users will be pleased to know that apart from the excellent manual SOFTCAT MICRO'S supplies an 'AT A GLANCE OPTIONS' card for new users in despair.

Four help or menu screens (Design, Sprites, Load & Save and general menu), can be called up to provide useful info on function access. The major problem with using the package arises by virtue of the sheer number of facilities on offer: it will require constant use of ANIMATOR1 to remember all the command calls. Users of Hisoft's DEVPAC will know how difficult it is to familiarise so many control keys and, despite the logical grouping of keys, even with frequent use ANIMATOR1 is not that easy to use for somebody with a puny memory. Once you are familiar with the keyboard however, the controls can be operated at lightning speed compared to any mouse/pulldown menu system.

ANIMATOR1 provides 4 graphic creation modes.

The DESIGN mode enables ANIMATOR1 to be customised to the user's individual needs. Apart from selecting paintbrushes and airbrushes, hatches and colour, it allows the speed of the cursor to be modified (with an optional Beep indicator for pixel work). The Edit mode is fabulous, allowing brushes, airbrushes, hatches, character sets and UDGs to be redesigned. The magnify window, which is the draw window, is positioned at the bottom right of the screen and using the editor, detail can be scrolled with the cursor to point on the UDG or brush pattern to be modified. All the patterns and characters are displayed on the screen and can be accessed and edited in the simplest possible way.

The LINE & CIRCLE modes provide elastic drawing of lines and circles. ANIMATOR1 allows both ends of a line to be moved at the same time for positioning. Similarly, the circle may be moved about for positioning, while the diameter may be altered. Only when the right size and position has been chosen is the circle fixed.

The PRINT mode is uncanny. Once a string is entered using the current character set, it may be controlled as if it were a brush. Using shift keys 1, 2 and 3 the text may be expanded and contracted, squeezed and unsqueezed vertically and horizontally, and the spacing between letters expanded and contracted horizontally and vertically. The variations are staggering and text can be made to run at all angles.

Under general screen facilities everything can be found from Clear screens (bit image, attribute image for screen and sprites), sprite mask creation (effectively inverses all the sprites in memory to provide automatic sprite masks), screen inversion, screen scrolls, fine and coarse, (bit image, attribute or both), horizontal and vertical mirroring as well as the rotation and fill routines.

Needless to say, extensive save and load facilities are provided for screens, sprites (indicating width and depth, first and last sprite number, character squares - if used as UDG's -, bit or attribute image only), character sets, UDG's, hatches, brushes and airbrushes. SAVEing can be done to cassette, Micro-drive or Opus Discovery One. For Microdrive and disk drive there is an ERASE and CAT facility. ANIMATOR1 should be able to be converted onto other disk drives if there are no memory conflicts, as all the save and load commands have been left in BASIC for easy access.

THE COOKBOOK

The manual is excellent with a short introduction on how to get started, detailed instructions on the various drawing modes and information on all the menus. A chapter of Questions and Answers provides some useful hints and tips on applications. The concise index and appendix with the menu screens round off the user manual. A note pad and the not-to-be-missed control overview card (in short memory-ersatz) complete the package.

BON APPETIT!

ANIMATOR1 is a superb sprite and screen designer. For serious screen work there is hardly anything missing. Where it falls short is in presentation graphics and in a hard print facility for 80 column dot matrix printers. This is not surprising, as the author clearly intended designing a practical workhorse rather than a fancy graphics package. Perhaps this is where the major differences stems between ART STUDIO and ANIMATOR1. ANIMATOR1 is clearly superior as regards to practical screen and sprite facilities, but is not as attractive as ART STUDIO. On the other hand there is no real excuse for poor display graphics. The fear of creating a barrier between amateur user and professional has in fact undermined the quality of the program itself. It certainly doesn't stimulate the user to make any great artistic achievements. I sincerely hope prospective customers will not jump to the wrong conclusions on the basis of the (lack) of graphic quality.

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGH IT WAS SAFE TO BUY ART STUDIO...

Animator 1 is billed as the ultimate graphics tool... Mad Max Phillips riffles through its draws...

FAX BOX
Title: Animator 1
Publisher: Softcat Micros
Address: PO Box 79, Macclesfield, Cheshire, SK10 3NJ
Price: £14.95

Go on punk, make my Sprite... Animator 1i s not a cult sci-fi 'n' gore video starring some Clint-clone. But it is a sprite-designer come art package with a similar sort of butch machismo about it.

Softcat Micros claims it's a pro-tool for programmers and artists - not your wimpy mouse-driven arty-type trendy sort of program at all. This means two things. First, its capable of some amazing stuff that you can't do (or at least can't do easily) with any other package. Secondly, it has that raw, unshaven feel about it that makes it a bitch to learn and a devil to use.

Programmers are supposed to like that sort of thing. And, so the theory goes, it's far more important to have features you need than posey pop-up menus you don't. Given what Animator 1 crams into the machine, its a fair trade off.

TOP DRAW

Basically, it's a drawing package like Melbourne Draw or Art Studio or The Artist or Paintbox (remember that?). But it also has the ability to save parts of the screen as a series of sprites - you can create all the different frames of a sprite (face left, right, up, down, legs open, close, punch etc) at once and then instantly play them back on screen to see how they'll look in your finished game.

The drawing facilities are copious to say the least - lines and circles (with rubber-banding), definable brush widths, airbrushes, frills, shading and patterns, mirror, rotate and so on. Its easily a '2nd generation' package like Art Studio - golden-oldies like Melbourne Draw are a real hard slog these days.

The program is controlled strictly from the keyboard (no joystick - let alone mouse) using Q, A, O and P to move the cursor, plus keys for draw and erase and a high-speed move key. Other options are shifted keys - Z, X, C and V are used as extra shift keys in addition to Caps Shift! Some keys call up pop-up menus listing further options.

So, no way will you master this in a morning. And even after a lot of practice, you'll still keep going back to the rather stodgy manual. But ace game players will rapidly discover that they can't half work at a fair old pace once they've mastered the keyboard controls.

DRAW BACKS

Like all good 'programmer's' utilities, it's short on messages, badly error trapped and has some very strange bits. Ask to fill a shape with colour and it replies "CORRUPT SPRITES ?Y/any". Pardon me? What did I say wrong? Thing is it needs the sprite memory to do the fill calculations - if you reply "N", it'll swap a chunk of memory off the microdrive and keep your designs in one piece. Okay in practice - but definitely a bit odd the first time you meet it!

Of course, designing sprites is one thing - it's no good if you can't use them in your own programs. Animator 1 does not provide any sprite generator software at all for you to use - the idea is that you save off the designs you've created and then build them into your own program.

If you're a Basic programmer, what you end up with is effectively a vast bunch of UDGs and little chance of quality high-speed animation. If you write in code, you can take the bit-maps of the sprites (byte-wise or character-wise, left-to-right, top to bottom) and incorporate them in your own routines. If, like most people, you find this format is too simplistic, you'll need to write a conversion program to get the sprite data the way you want.

Alternatively, it may be possible to customise Animator 1 how you like... the Basic parts are accessible and Softcat may be able to help you set up what you need.

All this means that Animator 1 is a very handy design and doodling tool for serious users who are sick of pen and paper and don't already have home-made programs for doing the same sort of work. And if you're that serious, you'll probably already have the microdrives or disk drives that you'll need to make full use of the program - Animator 1 should be transferable to any storage device you've got because all the tricky Save/Load bits are in Basic. Clever that!

So if you're new to the game and just want to do pretty screens, think hard about Art Studio. If you reckon the sprite-animation bit would be handy, have a good look at Animator 1 - as the saying goes, it's pretty rapid!

Publisher: Softcat Software, PO Box 79, Macclesfield, Cheshire SK10 3NJ
Price: £14.95
Memory: 48K

Tired of the way programmers flex their graphics muscles at you from the screen? Want to add life and complexity to those little black blobs you call aliens in your feeble attempts to write arcade games?

Animator1 can enhance your Basic and machine code programs using a screen designer coupled with an advanced sprite animator. All those functions are controlled using the keyboard. Devices such as mice and joysticks are not necessary - according to the publisher. Such devices are a hindrance to artists who cannot get enough detail into their designs when using them.

The whole screen is used for drawing and you can set up several sprite shapes at the same time using a cursor which mimics brush or airbrush and can lay down a variety of hatchings and textures. The cursor can also draw lines and shapes using one of the characters from the user-defined, or normal character, sets or even a smiling face.

There are four graphics creation modes - design, line, circle and print. The design mode alters the texture of the drawing cursor.

Five types of brush are included and they form part of the whole of a character square. You can also use hatch 14 as a brush, and trail a smiling face across the screen.

There are 14 predefined hatches - called textures in other packages of this type - but another 65521 can be user-defined. The character set, user-defined graphics and brushes can also be changed on-screen using a cursor. There is no need to call up each character or brush to make a change, just move the cursor to the chosen character and start inking or erasing.

The line and circle modes create shapes on the screen which can be filled with texture or colour. Unlike other packages on the market you do not have to define the origin of a line before you start to play with the other end. Animator1 allows you to play with both ends of a line and to stretch it in any direction - what versatility!

Circles can be drawn more accurately than with packages such as Art Studio and The Artist. A cross-hair cursor, which can be made bigger or smaller, is used to depict the origin and diameter of the circle. Pressing the draw key will print a circle touching the four spikes of the cross-hair. That method is easier and more exact than using a pixel-width cursor to select the two circle points.

Print mode is nothing less than stunning. You type in a message which is displayed on the screen. It can then be stretched, compressed and pointed in any direction using the cursor movement keys. The message can even be rotated on its own axis.

Once you have designed your screen you can select parts of it to be sprites. A rectangular window defaulted at the centre of the screen shows the part of the main display in which the draw cursor is located. That frame can be saved as a sprite by specifying the new sprite number.

The use of the whole screen as a sprite sketch pad is useful because you can create a series of figures side by side which show the stages of animation. You can then save each of those as a sprite and animate it.

All you have to do to animate a series of sprites is to specify the range in which they fall - such as 1 to 5 - and press Enter. An example series of sprites, showing an animated man, is included and illustrates the sophistication of the package over other products.

We're not finished yet, though. Animator1 can also mirror the screen image, scroll it and expand, contract and rotate it at an instantaneous speed which puts Art Studio to shame. You can manipulate the whole screen, part of it, or the attributes, using the window system and the cursor movement keys.

The sprites and screen displays can be stored on tape, disc or microdrive and be run in Basic or machine code programs. Instructions for their use are given in the concise but easy to read booklet.

As a design package Animator1 beats Art Studio and The Artist in all but fancy display packaging and price. It is most certainly the best sprite creator around because it is so easy to use. The package invites use rather than putting up a barrier between it and beginners.

I wish this new company well and hope it finds a retail outlet soon.

Softcat Micros
£14.95

While wandering around at the last ZX Microfair I came across a stand where a software house that I'd never heard of before was demonstrating an interesting looking graphics utility called Animator 1. One quick chat and an impressive demo later, and we'd arranged for a review copy to be sent in.

Unlike The Artist, Art Studio and other graphics utilities, Animator 1 is not intended primarily as a tool for drawing screen pictures with; instead, one of its main functions is for developing sprites and animating them to show how they will look when incorporated into other programs.

SPRITE TIME

When the program first loads you are presented with a predefined screen with pictures of a kung fu fighter and the Animator logo. In the lop left-hand corner of the screen is the sprite window in which, not surprisingly, you draw your sprites. Next to this in the middle of the screen is the magnifying window which gives a magnified view of the area immediately surrounding the drawing cursor. Having both the magnified and real-size versions of the sprite on view at the same time is a useful idea as it saves switching back and forth between different magnification modes as many utilities require you to do.

The size of the sprite window can be defined according to your requirements, up to the full size of the screen though the larger the sprite, the fewer the number that can be held in memory. When the program loads the sprite window is set at sixty four pixels wide by ninety six high and up to seventeen of these can be stored in memory.

The magnify window can be moved around the screen or switched off all together if you want to draw on a part of the screen that it normally occupies. If you wish, the sprite window can be done away with, allowing you to draw screen pictures as other utilities do.

The program shares many features that are now standard in such utilities; elastic and fixed line drawing, circles, and a variety of pen sizes and brush patterns.

It's a mistake to compare Animator 1 to programs like The Art Studio because as an all-round screen designer it's not in the same league. Much of the memory that could be used by drawing routines is given over to sprite storage and animation so there are no fancy Cut and Paste routines and only a few simple shape drawing routines. But, as a dedicated sprite designer it's very good indeed, and there are a number of commands which allow you to manipulate areas of the screen that would be unnecessary in a conventional graphics program, but which could be very useful for instance, for someone attempting to design a series of sprites tor an animation sequence in a game.

These commands allow you to rotate, reflect and scroll either the whole screen, the attributes alone, pixels alone or to expand and contract the screen (this turned out to be a surprisingly useful facility which produced some interesting effects, especially when making dumps to a printer and there's an example of this using screen dumps of the Camelot design supplied on the Animator tape).

The control of these commands is cleverly done: the scroll and rotate keys are along the top (numbered) row, and the choice of attributes, pixels and so on is controlled by the bottom row, so to scroll the attributes you just select the relevant numbered key and press the attributes key (X), or the key relating to whatever part of your picture that needs to be scrolled.

The circle command is also well implemented. Instead of choosing the centre point and then moving the cursor to the radius, Animator 1 places a set of cross hairs on the screen which indicate the position and size of the circle before it is drawn. The cross hairs can be moved around the screen and adjusted to change the size of the circle - a better method than I've seen used by any other graphics program.

Once you've designed your sprites you can FETCH them one at a time to the screen, or there is an ANIMATE option that allows you to animate any combination of sprites at varying speed. The magnifying window remains functioning while this happens so you can have a close look at individual sprites, and there is a frame counter that gives a constant readout of what point in the animation sequence you have reached. This allows you to inspect each sequence in detail and make any changes necessary before SAVING the sprites for future use.

PRINT MODE

Animator 1 has some excellent commands for handling text. You can enter a string of up to eighty characters, and using the top row of keys this can be moved around the screen (keys 5-8) or distorted by expanding, contracting or altering the spacing between letter (keys 1-3). When these commands are used together they allow you an enormous number of ways of manipulating text.

My only real criticisms of Animator 1 concern certain aspects of its ease of use. The manual, in its present form, is simply not very well written. It seems to have been written by someone who already knows just what the program is capable of and doesn't really go down to the most basic level that the first time user starts from. It took me a long time of hit-and-miss experimentation with the controls and the various pull down menus to achieve any sort of familiarity with the program's capabilities (though once I had done that I found myself enjoying using the program).

One or two of the menus also get a bit tedious to use, as they lead you on through a series of sub menus that quite often may not be needed, though you still have to plough through them before getting back into drawing mode. The menu for loading SCREEN$s into the program only allows you to do so if you enter the name of the screen - you can't tell it to just load the first screen that it comes to on a tape (ie LOAD "" SCREEN$s), which is inconvenient though not a major drawback.

Still, with one or two reservations about the manual, I nonetheless found Animator 1 a useful and quite enjoyable utility. As I said, it's not the worlds greatest all-round graphics program, but with its animation, rotation/reflection and other functions, it is one of the best programs specifically for designing animated graphics.