Future of the animation feature

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Saturday 20 December 2014 Dec 21:09:57 Timothée Giet wrote:

> That is a good terminology explanation, I think.

Okay, keeping this terminology, I think that it boils down to what Jouni already said: what's primary, the row, or the column -- the layer or the frame. 

So, we either create the concept of time, and place KisImage inside it, or take KisImage, and place the concept of time in KisImage. My thoughts were all going in the first direction, but under the shower I started thinking of the implications of the second direction. 

I'm not sure what will be easier, technically, when it comes to things like rendering the layerstack, preparing cached frames, swapping out KisNodes, but here are some points:

* If we put the idea of time in KisImage, we shouldn't create special layers.
* We should instead make time a first-class property of KisImage, with a 'still' image having just one frame.
* All layers (including group layers) should get the idea of time
* Time should apply not just to paint devices, but also to properties like visibility, and for filter layers and masks, to the filter config.
* Time should be managed by KisImage; we don't want individual layers have different ideas of frames and time, that would just lead to confusion.

Here's another consequence: if we make KisImage contain the animation timeline, the core of the animation code goes into krita/image, otherwise it goes into krita/ui...

-- 
Boudewijn Rempt
http://www.valdyas.org, http://www.krita.org