Newbee dreams...

[Luis M Ibarra <mibarra@laplace.dgae.unam.mx>]

	Hi, everyone.

	Seeing a computer animation video a couple of years ago, I get
really excited dreaming about doing an animation by myself.

	Never  doing nothing  really   serious about  the issue,  I've
collected  a fair  amount of information   and tools  for  creating an
animation. Renderers (like PovRay), books, 3d objects files, modellers
(AERO, sceda...), animation encoders (mpeg_encode), etc...

	Nevertheless, I was laking the most important things, a) time,
b) motivation, c) help, and the most important of all d) a theme.

	I now have  some free time, a  *LOT* of  motivation. but still
needing what I come here to  look for. Your help and  the theme of the
animation.

	I think that my idea, will be appealing  to some of you. 'cos,
it may  be  a good  add-on  to XConq,  and it   me be indeed  easy  to
implement on the XConq side.

	While playing XConq I found the theme  of my animation, a war,
a computer simulated  war.  

	Take any XConq game session, save  all the events, and all the
information about the terrain,  units,  etc... Give the terrain  info,
and the events to a home-brew animation  creating program to place the
units over the terrain,  and  add lights, and  to  choose a good  view
point on relevant events, etc...   This program gives you like output,
a frame to frame description  of the world.   Make some pretty looking
3D objects, for the units and  the terrain.  Give  the objects and the
frames descriptions to the renderer and the  anim encoder, so they can
start to crunch numbers at please.  Go to get some fun for a couple of
days, maybe weeks (depends  on the size  of your CPU).  And then, come
back to see a pretty animation  with ships slowly approching an unware
harbor, and defense planes flying over bombing a carrier, and ...

	I'm  thinking on   starting   by  getting  all the    relevant
information from XConq, I was trying to make  a new interface based on
the skelconq.c   minimal interface.  but not   having much luck (Gosh,
XConq is  *complex*).  The interface  is indeend very simple.  Setup a
fixed game, between to mplayers, run without stop the hole game saving
all the events to disk.

	what do you think?, I now I haven't do my homework with xconq,
reading the source, etc.., in fact, I comming were for a short cut :).

	comments? (I want that all the code to the animation thing, to
be under the GPL License).

	Saludos!

English is not my mother language, so if  you can't make any sense out
of something of the above. it's not *your* fault :).