wap - Open Cubic Player
Description: Open Cubic Player

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## 8 WurfelAnimator WAP

This chapter is written by Felix Domke, the author of WAP.

### 8.1 What is the so called WurfelMode?

In version 1.0 of the famous Cubic Player, pascal got a nice idea of playing silly animations inside the Player.

He invented the WurfelMode (Wurfel is the german word for cube). The WurfelMode was able to play animations with a resolution of 160x100 pixels in 256 colors in a special tweaked vga-mode. The animation format was a special one.

### 8.2 How can I create such animations by myself?

Long time, only the cubic team (or even only pascal?) itself was able to create such animations. The reason for this was that, as said, the animations had to be in a very special format, and the only tool that was be able to create this format were the not-so-famous WurfelTools. Included there was a tool called `makedmp.exe`. It took various `.tga` files, and made a `.dat` animation out of them. But noone checked how this tools worked, mainly because it had no command-line-help and the sources weren't available anymore.

But times are changing. Today, you don't have to guess how to use a utility anymore. You just have to read the documentation (yes, even you, Realtime ;). Today, you can even use a resolution of 320x200 (wow, THAT's highres).

For people who didn't guess how pascal's tool worked, I made a new one. This time with source available to all interested people. This time with `.pcx` images, not .tga one, because `.pcx` is much easier to read, and also more widely supported. This time even with some palette-aligning, so you don't have to care about same palettes anymore.

### 8.3 And how can I use your tool?

First, you have to render/paint/rip a animation. It HAS to be 320x200, or, if you want to make an old, $<$ OCP 2.0q, animation, 160x100. In case you didn't notice, the OCP 2.0q and higher has a new WurfelMode, called WurfelMode ][ , with support for 320x200 pixels images, instead of the lowres 160x100 ones.

Your animation should be in the form of many, many `.pcx` files, called for example `PIC000.PCX`, `PIC001.PCX`, `PIC002.PCX` and so on. They must have only 256 colors, and they should have all the same palette. If they don't have the same palette, the palette will be aligned. But my calculation of this isn't very good (but it works :), so for BEST results you have to do this in your favourite picture-editing-program. Next, you have to create a script. This script contains informations about the filenames of your frames, and a some other stuff.

The script has the following format:

         Version
         [SFO] RLECompression
         Title
         NumFrames Delay Filename
         [NumFrames Delay Filename]
         [NumFrames Delay Filename]
         [...                     ]

Version is either 0 or 1, 0 for 160x100 animations, 1 for 320x200. If you want to create a Version 0-animation, SFO should be set to 1, if you want to create a Version 1-animtion, SFO has to be left out. 1 RLECompression should be set to 1, it compresses the Animation a little bit. Title is the title of the animation, it shouldn't be longer than 31 chars, it's displayed inside the fileselector of OCP.

After this header, a random number of section follows (but at least ONE ;).

Every section describes a sequence of some PCXs. In the final animation, all sections are joint together.

NumFrames is the number of frames in this sequence. For example, if you have PCXs that are named from `PIC000.PCX` up to `PIC199.PCX`, NumFrames should be 200. Delay is handled a little bit different in the two versions. If you want to create a Version 0-animation, a Delay of 1 means a framerate of about 21.3 frames per second, a Delay of 2 is about 10.65 fps (the half), a Delay of 3 is about 7.1 (a third) and so on.

If you want to create a Version 1-animation, Delay is 65536/desired fps, so if you want to have 15fps, "Delay" should be 4369. This value has to be BELOW 65536 (and above 0, of course :) Filename is the filename of your sequence. Because most animations have more than 1 frame, you can use %d (and other C-printf placeholders). For people whose native language is not C, here some short examples:

filename | framenumber | real filename
pic%d.pcx | 0 | pic0.pcx
| 1 | pic1.pcx
| 2 | pic2.pcx
| 3 | pic3.pcx
| 9 | pic9.pcx
| 10 | pic10.pcx
| 11 | pic11.pcx
pic%03d.pcx | 0 | pic000.pcx
| 1 | pic001.pcx
| 2 | pic002.pcx
| 3 | pic003.pcx
| 9 | pic009.pcx
| 10 | pic010.pcx
| 11 | pic011.pcx

The framenumber always starts with 0, not with 1, keep this in mind!

Here is an example script: (version 0)

         0
         1 1
         a basic cubic-player animation
         11 2 intro%d.pcx
         200 1 ani%03d.pcx

This animation would have 211 frames (`intro0.pcx` to `intro10.pcx`, then `ani000.pcx` to `ani199.pcx`).

And here again one for version 1:

         1
         1
         an enhanced OpenCP animation
         11 3072 intro%x.pcx
         200 1000 ani%03d.pcx

To create the animation, just type in

         wap <scriptfilename.scr> <outputfilename.dat>

and hit <Enter>.

The WurfelAnimator will now try to make the animation. To view the animation inside OCP, rename the created `.DAT`-file to `CPANU001.DAT` (or `CPANI002.DAT` and so on...) and press <w> inside the player.

### 8.4 This tool doesn't work!

No problem,I have always an open ear for your problems. Just write your problems to mailto:tmbinc@gmx.net.

Maybe you have luck and meet me on IRC, usually I am in irc://#coders.ger and some other channels, but if you don't know those, well, maybe you're not welcome on them ;)

Anyway, maybe you have some fun with this tool.

#### Footnotes

[1] If you're interested what this value means, well, just get the original documentation for professionals, it's described there