Plymouth animated startup

[Charlie Brej]

Charlie Brej wrote:
> Máirín Duffy wrote:
>> I just saw your startup screen running on Ray Strode's machine and it 
>> is really fantastic.
>>
>> It'd be cool to see one with spinning gears for Gears, and one with 
>> solar flares for Solar!
> 
> The gear one was easy to implement, it is just a case of deciding the 
> position and speed of turning. Because tiny angle changes are easily 
> visible on gears (the teeth are not aligned) there must be a massive 
> number of rotated images stored in memory (360 works well). The other 
> problem is that because there is a directional shade across the gear 
> image I used, it looks a bit naff when that shade then rotates and the 
> shades of the different gears are at different angles.
> 
> The solar one on the other hand is rather difficult to make. Animating 
> the flares is quite hard but I think I should have something to show 
> quite soon.

I added some shading to the invinXble theme [1]. And I had a bit of a go 
at creating solar flares[2] on the solar theme[3]. This still needs 
quite a bit of work and it doesn't look as nice as thee invinXble one.

[1] http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~brejc8/temp/3.swf
[3] http://www.crystalinks.com/solarflare105a.jpg
[2] http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~brejc8/temp/4.swf