Mark Wilson's Home Page - Miscellaneous/S.W.A.T

Stupid Web Animation Tricks

I guess this came about because I was thinking of having an array of spinning globes as a backdrop, at least for my Home page. Something like this:

I'm sure you'll agree that this is a bad idea. Note that the images are synchronised (or at least they are in Internet Explorer). This got me thinking about the possibilities for some animation tricks. I thought of Magritte's Golconda (sometimes called Golconde), an image I had thought of animating as a screen saver. So, I played around a bit, wrote a program to produce each frame of the animation (by translating one or more "sprites" through a fixed frame, wrapping the image when it hit the edges, etc.) The result was a single animated GIF which, when tiled using the HTML <BODY> tag's BACKGROUND= attribute, produces a seamless screen-filling animation.

If you get jerky or jumbled animation, try reducing the size of your window -- I've noticed that my home machine just isn't powerful enough to render all the frames simultaneously.

Here, with apologies to Rene Magritte and professional animators everywhere, is my first effort.

And here's my second. This is my AIM buddy icon (I'm "FunnyPolynomial").