This is documentation for "Play" - the player program which
accompanies Deluxe Paint III.  This documentation and the Play
program and icon are 

             Copyright 1989 Electronic Arts 

and have been uploaded by permission of Electronic Arts.  If you
recirculate this file, please keep this ARChive intact and do not
separate the documentation or the icon from the player, as the
player has no built in help and many of its functions would be
non-obvious to a user who has never seen it before. Thank you.

-----
[documentation which follows was keyed in by Harv Laser (Plink:
CBM*HARV) from the Dpaint III manual with the express permission
of Electronic Arts]
-----

THE PLAYER UTILITY

The Player utility lets you play the animations you created with
DeluxePaint III.  You can boot the utility from the Workbench or
use CLI arguments to start the Player.

From the Workbench click on the Play icon. This loads the program
in the default screen format (lo-res, 320 x 200, with 32 colors). 
The screen is black and the menu bar is not displayed.  To see
the program's single menu, move the pointer to the upper left
part of the screen and press down on the right mouse button. 
ANIMATE appears in the menu bar, and the menu options, LOAD,
PLAY, ABOUT, and QUIT appear below the title.

You're now in the "interactive" mode.  Choose LOAD and when the
Load Anim requester appears, specify which drive you want to make
active (df1: or df0:) and then load a picture or anim from the
directory of the drive you chose.  When you click Load in the
requester, the utility automatically plays the highlighted file. 
Choose PLAY to play a picture or anim you've already loaded, just
as you would in DeluxePaint III.

After you've loaded an animation in memory, the Load Anim
requester looks a little different when you choose LOAD again. 
The APPEND button appears in the requester.  Click APPEND only if
you want to add the picture or animation you're currently loading
to the back end of the animation that's already in memory.

You can use the same keyboard commands you've used in DeluxePaint
III while you view your animation.

KEY                         EFFECT

Tab                         Turns color cycling on/off
Left Arrow                  Slows down play rate
Right Arrow                 Speeds up play rate
r                           Reverses play direction
Esc or Space bar            Stops play
1                           Go to previous frame
2                           Go to next frame
4                           Play the animation
5                           Play once
6                           Play ping-pong
 
To use Player from the CLI, open the CLi from the Workbench.  On
the command line type PLAY, [space bar], and the filename of the
picture or anim you want to load.  If you want to show the anim
for a certain number of seconds, press the [space bar] and type
that number after the filename.  If you would like to indicate
that the number is a loop count instead of time in seconds, press
the [space bar] again and type "loops".  You're now ready to
issue play commands for your animation (or you can press [return]
right now and your animation will play and take you back to the
CLI when it's finished).

*NOTE if you type an @ before the filename in the first line, the
following text string is the name of a script file from which
commands are read.  Script files are ASCII text files crated with
a text editor such as ED or MEMACS, both of which are included
with Workbench 1.3.

Play Commands from CLI:

COMMAND                     MEANING

play                        Run the interactive Player
play pict_or_anim           Load pict_or_anim, interactive
play pict_or_anim 10        Load Pict_or_anim: show for 10       
                               seconds then exit
play foo 20 seconds         Load foo: show for 20 seconds, then  
                             exit
play anim 20 loops          Load anim: play 20 loops, then exit
play @test                  REad commands from script file "test"

The script commands, one per line, are similar to the CLI
commands except that the word "play" is omitted.

COMMAND                     MEANING

pict_or_anim 5              Display Pict_or_anim for 5 seconds
anim 10 loops               Display anim for 10 loops
anim                        Play anim until user hits key
pict                        Display pict until user hits key

If you hit the Space bar or click the left mouse button while a
picture or anim is running the program will move to the next
command, even if the specified play-time has not elapsed.

File names with blanks must be enclosed in quotation (" ") marks.

A command line starting with a ; (semicolon) is skipped.