Fran Release 0.9
Functional Reactive Animation
Last modified March 06, 1997
Fran is a Haskell library for simple 2D animation. It runs on Hugs version 1.4 under
Windows 95 and Windows NT, using Win32 graphics (GDI).
Try it, it's fun! Please let me know how it goes.
See news for details on changes from
one version to another.
Directions
Fran is part of the Hugs 1.4 release and is ready to run when
the pre-compiled Win32 hugs release is installed. Fran is found
in lib/fran on this release. A user guide is
included. A tutorial is available on the web at
http://www.research.microsoft.com/~conal/fran/tutorial.hs.
Future work
Credits
- Greg Schechter, Ricky Yeung, Salim AbiEzzi, and I
collaborated at Sun Microsystems on TBAG,
a system for constraint-based, semi-declarative modeling
of 3D animation. Some of the Fran ideas were initially
explored there.
- Todd
Knoblock and Jim Kajiya helped to explore the basic
ideas of behaviors and events.
- Sigbjorn Finne
helped a lot with the implementation during his summer
'96 internship.
- Anthony Daniels
has been pushing the limits of physics-oriented reactive
behavior, uncovering some limitations in the
implementation.
- Paul
Hudak has been collaborating on the ideas and, in
particular, how to embed them in Haskell.
- Alastair
Reid answered lots of my naive questions about
Haskell and its implementation, and provided some
emergency Hugs hacking. He also made very helpful pass
through version 0.8, updating it to a newer Hugs version,
and making various improvements, and rewriting
PrimInteract.hs to be much simpler.
- John
Peterson wrote another implementation that provided
an interesting comparison and provided many interesting
discussions. He also wrote the user's manual with Gary
Shu Ling.
- Gary Shu
Ling found misc bugs and sources of incompletenesses.
- Simon Peyton
Jones is helping me understand GHC
(the Glasgow Haskell compiler) and how to use it
effectively to compiler animation programs, as well as
how to better implement Fran.
- Mark
Jones has been helping me understand Haskell type
classes and how to use them well in Fran.
- Philip Wadler
had provided interesting and insightful feedback on the
semantics of behaviors and events.
- Pixel Monkey
provided some images from their sampler.
Contact
Conal
Elliott
Graphics Research Group
Microsoft Research
conal@microsoft.com