This Chapter is dedicated to equipping the AMOS Professional programmer with the means to create the smoothest, fastest and most responsive animations possible. This is achieved by an animation language that is unique to the AMOS system, and which provides the most complex animation effects in the simplest way.
A detailed tutorial is held in the AMAL folder on your Tutorial disc.
The AMOS Animation Language (AMAL)
To generate professional quality computer simulations and arcade games, dozens of objects may
need to be animated on screen simultaneously, and each object must be moved dozens of times
every second. This presents problems for machine code programmers, and as far as normal Basic
languages are concerned, it is asking the impossible!
AMOS Professional ignores these problems altogether! By making use of its own animation language, and by creating separate animation programs, very fast, very smooth movements are achieved independently of the main program. This animation facility is called the AMOS Animation Language, or AMAL for short.
Up to 16 different AMAL programs can be run simultaneously, using interrupts, and each program can be used to animate anything from Sprites and Bobs, to an entire graphical screen!
Each AMAL program controls the movements of a single Object, which can be moved in an infinite range of pre-defined patterns, from a simple trajectory curve to an incredibly detailed journey around the screen.
Objects can be controlled directly from the mouse or by joysticks, and any AMAL animation can be called up from within your main AMOS Professional program. AMAL is so powerful and so versatile that it really is a question of "seeing is believing", and there are useful ready-made examples waiting to be experienced.
AMAL is called a "language" because it really does have all the facilities of a genuine Basic vocabulary, with the huge advantage of the fact that all instructions have been optimised for the greatest possible speed. There are commands for all the features you might expect, such as program control, decision making and loops, but not only are they executed incredibly fast, AMAL programs are automatically compiled before they are run!
How AMAL is used
AMAL commands consist of the shortest possible keywords, so an AMAL instruction is
recognised by only one or two capital letters. Everything in lower case is ignored.
This means that you can customise your AMAL instructions to make them more individual, or easier to recognise. For example, to animate an Object, the appropriate AMAL command word consists of a single capital A. You are allowed to include this in your listings on its own, or as something like this:
X> Anim Animate Anything