Creating smooth animations for Furcadia can be a pain, especially with alignment. Especially if all the shapes being animated are of different sizes.

To that end is one of the reasons I designed the main interface for FoxEdit the way I did, it's to be able to single pixel nudge the shapes into the position needed for smooth animations. Plus with the list on the left side of the window, you can walk through the shapes and ensure that it's fairly smooth in how it all looks.

No, I'm not stopping the development of this, but the program has gotten too many cross function dependencies for it to be a continuing and dependable project. So I'm having to rebuild the program from just about scratch. The just about part is that everything works, I just need to restructure the program to make better use of it's components, and deal with the coming transition into true color. With that in mind, it is entirely possible that the latest version I've uploaded may contain a bug or two which will prevent the proper operation of other parts of the program. They might not crash the program, but something might not work right suddenly after doing something with another part of the program.

With that in mind, I'm also going to rebuild the program in PowerBasic which is a more powerful programming language with quite a few features that VB does not natively support. On the other hand, it less forgiving with coding mistakes, but then I don't make mistakes.

You may want to stand back a bit.

The end result will be a more compact program with a lighter memory footprint which will be faster to execute. It will take some time to transfer and test all the code from the VB version, so don't expect everything to suddenly appear in the PB version which exists currently in the VB version.

Oh what a tangled project I create. For an idea of just how complicated I got with this part of the program, just take a look at the whole form before it gets "compressed" to it's working size. But it is packed with awesome, yet fairly simple and easy to use due to the complexity hidden in the multiple frames which are only displayed according to which section of the program you are using. What started out as a simple means of adding text to a patch image blossomed into a feature where many of the various attributes which can define a font, and how it's rendered to the drawing surface, can be adjusted to create just the look you want in the finished product. Overall, it contains a lot behind the scenes to work with text:

• 3000+ lines of code
• 135 subroutines and functions
• 191 controls in use on the surface.

So the best way to describe how to use all these features is to go through each panel one by one, and explain all the functionality found on each.

The easiest and fastest means of generating some text is to simply select a font, type in some text, and press render. Clicking on the render surface pops the results where you can get a better look at it, then you can get into using features from some of the other panels to adjust the results to achieve the results you want.

Well, before I bug out for a possible extended enforced vacation, I thought I'd put up my latest build which supports Cut, Copy, & Paste of images. And also the selection of parts, or all, of images and moving them about on the drawing surface.