I know this is not exactly what you might have in mind when you think of "plug-ins", but, since we have a nice collection of programmers here, I thought I throw this out there for some thought.
LaserBoy can create sets of frames based on functions. One kind of function takes a single frame of vector art and makes a series of frames that are an animation. Another kind of function takes a frame set as input and applies some sort of effect to the whole thing.
These functions are separated from the rest of the code in LaserBoy in their own files; ez_uail_frame_effects.cpp and ez_uail_frame_set_effects.cpp.
The neat thing about this is that YOU can add your own special effects to LaserBoy! All you need to do is make up a new function (in the appropriate cpp file) add its location (pointer to function) to a list and its name as a string. Then you have to compile this code page and re-link the executable.
It's no big deal to set up Dev-C++ on any Windows machine. Alec did it and he's not a C++ programmer! The .dev file that opens in Dev-C++ is part of the LaserBoy distro.
Once you have this going, you can tweak and experiment very quickly, because only that one code page needs to be compiled.
You call upon these functions in the output menu 'o'. They are options 4 & 5. The frame effects work on whatever frame is currently in the view. The frame set effects work on some or all of the frames that are currently loaded.
When you choose one of the effects by name, it is applied and saved as an ILDA file of the same name as the effect.
To see it, you need to open the ILDA file into the LaserBoy view.
Check it out. If nothing else, it might give you some ideas for your own code.
There is also a mechanism for creating whole frame sets from arythmetic functions (abstracts!) but it has never had any interface in the multi-platform version of LaserBoy.
James.
