tedd wrote:
> It occurred to me the other day that placing moving GIF's in an HTML
> document is pretty simple and they work without any programming effort. My
> questions, it why can't we do the same thing in FB? Or, can we? Anyone have
> any information as to this possibility?

If your goal is, "get my favorite animated GIF to display in FB," then I
can't help you (I'm sure it can be done, with sufficient programming
effort (but that's what we're trying to avoid, right?))

If your goal is, "get some fancy animation going with just a few program
lines," then you could use animated PICT's.  For example, if you turn on
picture recording, then do ten COPYBITS commands (of different source
pictures, but all onto the same destination rectangle), and then turn
off picture recording, you've essentially just made yourself a 10-frame
animation.  You can save it as a PICT file or resource, and all you have
to use is DRAWPICTURE (or FB's PICTURE statement) to play it back.

A while back I did something like this in a version I wrote of the
classic game of "Life" (where little cells change color as they live and
die).  My program turned on picture recording after "seeding" the board,
and turned it off again after a certain number of generations had
transpired.  I could then replay--at high speed--the entire evolution of
the game, with just a single PICTURE statement.

The main problem with animations like this (besides sub-optimal
compression) is that you can't control the speed of the playback, and
they may play _too_ fast.  Theoretically, I guess you could use Picture
Comments to put a delay feature into them.

- Rick