email: dhutchen@millersv.bitnet (yes, I'm sharing an account for now)
This HyperCube document contains several examples of animation. It is based on the typical ways of doing animation with HyperCard but takes advantage of some of HyperCube's added power. Feel free to borrow the scripts (they have longer comments).
The first example is of a bouncing ball. The effect is similar to that provided by Paracomp's Director animation program. The idea came from the tutorial for that program. The ball pictures are ovals that shown and hidden in sequence. If you did this in HyperCard, you would need to create buttons to hide and show the pictures. But if you just need to show single objects of similar type, you can do it directly in HyperCube. I refer to this as hide/show animation.
The second example is snow. This is similar to the bouncing ball except that the objects are more complex. Therefore, I use opaque buttons to hide the graphic images. I sequentially hide the buttons to reveal the pictures and then hide them again. I scatter the buttons around the screen to produce a random effect. This another example of hide/show animation.
The third example is of painting animation. A script draws objects on the screen and drags them around. I use a sunrise as an example because I can draw suns, sort of.
The fourth example is of flip animation. It's a car movie similar to something you might have drawn as a child or built using one of the animation programs. Each sheet of animation is drawn with objects moved slightly. To display the animation, the sheets are shown in sequence. In HyperCard, I would use separate cards, but in HyperCube, I show the power of multiple layers on one page. The background (with the tree and street) is one layer. The cars are on several layers which are shown and hidden in sequence. It's all on one page. Note the alpha levels of the car windows. You can see the tree and other car through the windows.
