InstallerFX Animation and Slideshow support

InstallerFX does now have support for Animations or Slideshow. You can choose which of the modes you want to use, just by changing the prefs file. The graphical animation file is the same ether you use animation or a slideshow presentation.

How to build an animation graphics file ?

The animation format is very simple, I will here explain it by words but you can also look at the picture under and see an graphical display of the animation format.

1. The animation is an large wide picture with all the frames after each other. So it is just an large wide picture including all the frames. The fileformat is just any picture datatype object like IFF or GIF or JPEG.

2. The size of the picture will then be: Width of the first picture * Number of frames x Height of the first picture. Example 100x10x100 = 1000x100 pixels.

The main reason that I choosed this format is that I could easy render the same palette to all the frames, and the quality of the frames in the animation will be equal. The other reason is that you can save the picture in any format you wish and do not need to use any GIF anim format.

Number of frames in the Animation/Slideshow ?

Since the animation/slideshow actual is a large picture you have to tell InstallerFX the number of frames it is in the animation. Like in the example picture over, you can see that we have 8 frames so we just set the number of frames in the prefs file to 8.

InstallerFX will calculate the frame size by taking the total widht of the picture and divide it with the number of frames. If you select the wrong number of frames the InstallerFX will just make the framesize smaller or bigger than planned.

Loop or no loop ?

Sometime we want the animation/slideshow to loop and some times we just want to run the animation/slideshow once. If you set the animloop to 0 or 1 the animation/slideshow will only go once, if you set the values higher the animation/slideshow will loop as many times as you types in the Animloop felt in the prefs file.

How to choose between an animation or a slideshow ?

In the prefs file you select if you want an animation or an slideshow. A slideshow is a very slow animation, the picture is the same but the prefs file have the WaitFrame option set. You can not set both WaitFrame and AnimFrames Per Second, if you do the program will only use the values from the WaitFrame. If you do not set WaitFrame and do not set the AnimFrames Per Second InstallerFX does choose WaitFrame like 5 seconds.

So the differents between these two modes is the wait time. Slideshow is given by second to next frame, and anim is frames per second. You can see an example on the prefs file page.

Other details:

An animation/slideshow is working exactly as the picture mode, you can in the Installer script replace the animation/slideshow with another animation or a picture or you can remove it completely as discribed in How to use page.

Limitations ?

It is not possible to have an animation/slideshow tiled to the background, I could have supported it but I do not see the meaning of it, because it would take almost all the CPU !. If you set the tile option on in the prefsfile the InstallerFX just ignores it.

Example prefsfile for the picture at this page:

2
0
0
8
000
25
008
050

This InstallerFX will:

Place the window in center at the top of the screen, it is NOT borderless, it is not tiled. InstallerFX will move the InstallerWindow in center at the bottom of the screen. This is NOT an slideshow, the animation will cycle 25 frames per second and the animation have 8 frames, and it will loop 50 times.