Ming Library

[Robert Amesz]

[posted and mailed]

Arona wrote:

> I'm using the Ming library ( http://opaque.net/ming ) to create a
> Macromedia Flash movie. Has anyone on this list got any experience
> with this tool ?

It so happens that I found this library less than a month ago. It 
included SWIG Python bindings, but only for Python 1.5.2, and probably 
just for Unix and gcc at that. It took me quite a while to get it to 
build under Windows with the distutils, especially as it involved a 
spot of debugging as well. (Note: don't write C-expressions like 
"getc(fl) + (getc(fl) << 8)", ever.)

Only later I found out that there's a Ming project page on SourceForge, 
too. Aaargh! Why didn't it say so on the main Ming page? Still, there's 
only a CVS-tree there, which I declined to explore at that time: rather 
than chasing after the latest version I preferred to use what I had.

And it works quite well. It still lacks some features you'd expect, 
like the ability to use truetype fonts directly, and support for more 
image formats. Still, you can work around those and I had a lot of fun 
creating an animation wishing my friends and aquaintances a happy new 
year. It took _a lot_ of time, though, as I tried to utilize most of 
the transformations Flash has to offer and come up with something 
resonably sophisticated. But it was a nice learning experience. Anyway, 
the result is on http://www.amesz.demon.nl/2002.html (for the time 
being, anyway; also, it's in dutch), so judge for yourself.

I'll probably use Ming again, when I have some spare time, but not 
before I've written some decent helper classes for true keyframe-
animation. Using the library more-or-less in its raw state becomes a 
bit too cumbersome after a while for anything but really basic stuff.

But it works, it has documentation, and it's free, so I shouldn't 
complain.


> If yes, please be so kind as to reply offlist.

That would be quite rude to all the people in this group, 
usenettiquette is quite firm on that point. I'll mail you a copy of 
this message, but any subsequent discussions really should be held in 
comp.lang.python, in case anybody else is interested.


Robert Amesz