I wish we could define a set of points that would be used for the Motion Parameters.
So do I, very much so. It is possible to string together a set of arbitrary motions by doing them seperately and cross fading from one sprite to another, but is is hard work to do more than the very simplest things that way.
The underlying toolkit supports the use of arbitray functions for "easing curves" over and above the set of predefined ones we can currently use in animate: clauses so it should not be too difficult to provide a table driven curve.
Another rather simple possibility would be to prove a way to delay the start of a motion, or more generally to alter its phase, defined in an animate: clause. Currently when we use Animate: for a property X it calculates
X = X0 + f(t);
where X0 is the initial value of X, f() is one of the Qt easing curves and t the time in seconds since the start of the scene. By simply including an optional constant time offset, T0, defaulting to 0.0 this would become
tmp = t - T0;
X = X0 + f(tmp);
which would allow us to animate several properties belonging to one or more scene elements with different phases. Currently the best I have managed to phase shift by are 0, 90, 180 and 270 degrees - and even that involves a lot of work which this change would eliminate the need for as well as allowing arbitrary phases.
Furthermore if the formula is changed to
tmp = max ( t - T0, 0.0 );
X = X0 + f(tmp);
Then this would in effect delay the start of the motion as max(t-T,0.0) would be zero for the first T seconds. This in turn would allow us to string together a series of moves each starting just as another finished.
This could be generalised slghtly more to
tmp = max ( t - T0, T1 );
X = X0 + f(tmp);
where T1 is a second constant parameter. For a sequence of one off movements this provides no benefits but would open up some more possibilities when cyclic motions are involved.
Of course a nicer and much more powerfull solution would be to provide a way of defining almost arbitrary expressions for easing curve functions - but that would require much bigger changes to the software than that proposed above,
A nice animation, would be great if you could use it as a background for an iStripper scene.
Yes, that would be nice even if it was limited to something like animated gifs. Again I believe that the underlying toolkit provides all of the required functionality for all sorts of media playback but there is currenly no way to access that via a scene.
