[Gimp-developer] Animation choices

[Nik Omul <nik-omul yandex ru>]

Hello, fellow gimpers!

I am relatively new to GIMP - about one year of experience and still
learning something new almost every day. 
Being hooked to it from day one, my respect to all the developers and
contributors has been growing up ever since.
I am probably one of millions of grateful users holding my breath in
anticipation of full GIMP GEGL integration,
porting it to GTK3 and being on the receiving end of subsequent benefits in
this leap type of development.
I also  realize (as far as my knowledge base allows me) the challenges and
intricacies the developers facing in this endeavor.
For all that and trying to make GIMP even a better tool, my sincere thanks! 
Couple of questions here. 
I made animated splashes for GIMP and showed them to my 10 yr old nephew
some time ago. 
He liked the idea so much that we went on in exploring GIMP animation
capabilities. 
Making GIF animations in GIMP isn't exactly straightforward and easy thing
to do, especially HQ animations.
Not to mention you have to install at least a dozen of other plugins to
increase productivity rate and to make the quality/amount-of-effort-spent
ratio more or less adequate.  
On top of it - GIF's limited color depth. 
GAP was somewhat painful but nonetheless positive experience, and now it
seems to be abandoned by its developer for good. 
We can hardly make any use of it in 2.8 version. Given shrank animation
choices in GIMP we turned to apng and flash.

Question 1. Why apng isn't an officially supported file format? 
I'm aware of its applicability limitations in terms of web-site, browser and
image editing software support and the fact that some third party scripts
and plugins rely on standart libpng-png.
The former can change any day and the latter is fixable (well, it didn't
take a whole lot of Einstein from me to figure out how and I am not a
programmer). 
I suspect GIMP main architects are wary of linpng-apng patch and its
reliability. But why? The Mozilla team did it. Opera. XnView did it. The
list goes on. 
Are there any other reasons? I've been using APNG plugin for a while, its
back-compatibility with PNGs and overall reliability are beyond reproach. No
problems whatsoever.
 
Question 2. GIMP supports animated GIFs as its splash image. It doesn't
increase start-up time a bit, no matter how heavy GIF files I'm using (yes,
I timed it!) 
I want to try and make it work with apng. 
When I use animated png as a splash image, however, GIMP decodes and
displays only it's first frame. 
It happens despite file-png and libpng having been removed from plugins
folder and replaced by patched ones. 
What particular plugin(s) is responsible for program's start-up and opening
image inside a splash?
I've tried to locate it, but there are so many! And it seems like a chain of
commands is being called at start-up.  Hope somebody steer me in the right
direction.  
Thank you all in advance! 
Nikita O.
Никита Омуль
P.S. I am neither a programmer nor a professional artist. Just an average
gimper. So, please, treat me as such ;) Cheers!




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