FLIPlay
By Hugh Allan

Introduction
Welcome to FLIPlay. This program provides what I think you'll agree is the best available animation you'll see on a standard NeXTstation. It plays AutoDesks FLI format, as created by AutoDesk Animator and AutoDesk 3D Studio. So as you can guess the animation tends to be hand drawn or ray traced/shaded polygons.

Installation
Easy, just copy the FLIPlay.app app wrapper to /LocalApps or the Apps directory in your home directory, log out, and any file ending in .FLI/.fli's icon will change to the FLIPlay fli icon. Got that? How just click twice on it as you would any other file and the animation will display. A demo animation,  bounce.fli has been included.

Where to find FLI files:
Best source I know of is the Screen Artists: Danger! Hot Stuff CD-ROM. This is an IS0-9660 conforming CD-ROM which is provided free, you only pay the cost of the media. Expect to pay around £3.50 for it. My copy contains 200 Megs of 320x200 256 colour VGA animations. FLIPlay plays 95% of these(even the ones with packet errors, tut tut).

CIX, has a few, as does Compuserve, I don't know of any Internet ftp sites that carry these things, if you know of any please contact me and I'll include a list in this document.

I'll upload a compressed directory of FLIs to Purdue with this, look for BestFli.compressed in Purdue submissions... It'll be big! Real big... *GRIN*

Problems, and futures.
Animation speed does vary somewhat. The player is optimized only to display the smallest changed rectangle, but it does need some more work. Also it could do with a control panel. It will write an update sometime.

Also I have written Amiga based IFF ANIM players, so expect to see an ANIM player soon, as well as a grasp player. 

This app was written under 3.0, so I doubt it will work on any previoud versions, sorry!

Also, if anyone has details of the DL animation format, or better still details of QuickTime(propriety I guess? Hmmm...). Or if anyone knows of any other animation formats, please mail me.

InterNet: hallan%cix.compulink.co.uk@ukc.ac.uk
CIX: hallan
Mail:
Hugh Allan
Ness Castle
Dores Rd
Inverness IV1 2DJ