the Object Editor

If you are using the PAL or SECAM television display systems, there are 16 individual movie "frames" displayed in the top half of the screen, that can take one image each. If you are using the NTSC system, there will be eight frames available. These alternative systems are fully discussed in Appendix C of this User Guide.

Below these frames is your "movie screen", where the individual frames will be shown, animated one after the other.

Next to that is a horizontal slider bar for adjusting the speed of animation, from zero for "still video" up to 100 for a "turbo" speed of 50 frames per second in PAL mode, or 60 frames per second in NTSC.

The Quit box is down near the bottom right-hand corner.

To the right of the screen is a vertical stack where the current Object bank can be examined as usual, by running up and down its slider bar.

Using the Animation feature
To put any Object image into an animation sequence, all you have to do is click on it to make it appear in a movie frame. As soon as more than one image has been transferred in this way, the animation sequence begins to move, in the same order that the images were transferred.

To remove any individual image from the animation sequence, click on its movie frame image in the horizontal strip of frames, and it will disappear. This will cause all the following frames to shunt backwards towards the beginning of the sequence, and fill the gap.

The position of the Object animations on the "movie screen" is changed using the mouse pointer, and hot spots are automatically positioned beneath the mouse cursor when the mouse button in clicked.

After you [Quit] the animation suite, the movie sequence is held in memory, and the next time the [Animation] icon is triggered, the last recorded sequence will greet you.

To delete a sequence from memory, one of three things must happen:

• One of the animation images is deleted from the memory bank.
• A new Object image bank is selected.
• The original bank is erased.

Quit
As you might expect, the white flag icon gives up the Object editing process and surrenders to your next bout of programming. In case you forget to save anything to be used in the future, AMOS Professional will offer a timely reminder.

The Object Editor Drawing Tools
Beneath the line of Major Options icons, there is a whole line of smaller icons to explore.