I know frame-by-frame animation is considered a feature for after 1.0, however, my animator requires (and demands) it urgently for his current tasks. I am in discussions with management to bring on a new group of programmers in early spring to speed this up and finish the full frame-by-frame functionality as soon as possible on our fork.
Based on what my team and I have learned about the relationship between layers and time, we will likely need to rewrite some major aspects of this part of Synfig, in order to A) accomplish our scripting engine goals, B) make frame-by-frame more immediately possible, and C) speed up Synfig’s overall efficiency to meet our compatability needs. Besides that, the Layer and Context code has a lot of depreciated code and workarounds. My hope is that our changes would also improve the speed and efficiency of Synfig’s current animation abilities.
However, we haven’t been in the code that long, and we’re still learning it. Based on what ya’ll know about the code, what are we looking at? What parts of the code do you know of that will need to be rewritten or optimized to accomplish this? What gotchas are we looking at?
Again, if these changes will only be existing in our fork, I completely understand. There is the discinct possibility that MousePaw Games’ needs will depart from the canonical feature list, and the last thing I want to do is to interfere with the main Synfig project. Unlike the scripting engine, these changes are far from modular - they may alter major parts of Synfig. That said, even if our fork is never reintegrated, I want to keep the community involved in the process, in the hope that we can continue to aid the continued development of Synfig. Who knows? Perhaps our code will solve some problems that currently exist in the project.
Thanks in advace.