Storyboard Engine

Storyboard Engine continues to move forward with the goal of providing our customers with a broad list of supported targets.

Major Changes

OpenGL ES 1.1

Support for OpenGL ES on the Beagleboard using the PowerVR SDK has been added in this release. If you require support for another Open GL ES platform please contact us.

Animation Manager

The animation manager has been overhauled to minimize CPU usage and screen refreshes when multiple animations are happening in parallel.

New events and animation ids have been added to enable better control of the animations that are in progress.

Animation start / stop events can change arbitrary data values. This means you can edit string content for example.

Internationalization / Unicode Support

Internationalization support via Unicode Font support is available in this release. Storyboard is able to render any Unicode character or string provided a font with the appropriate glyph is provided.

Minor Changes

Rotation support for negative numbers

To rotate an image counter clockwise you can now use negative numbers instead of having to work back from 360 degrees.

Z co-ordinate for touch events

Platforms that have support for a Z co-ordinate, or pressure, will now be passed into the Storyboard Touch, Motion and Release events.

Keys events under windows all in upper case

Resolved an issue on Window platforms with a key press delivering the character in upper case when it should be lower case.

gre.send_event_data() supports all data formats

Removed limitation for gre.send_event_data() only supporting 4u1 and 1s0 for data types. Now any data type available in Storyboard is available.

gre.send_event_target()

Added a new function gre.send_event_target() which enables an event to be targeted at a particular model object.

gre.quit available on WinCE

WinCE now supports the gre.quit event.

WinCE and QNX memory optimization

Optimized both WinCE and QNX sbengine to better utilize system memory.

Support for GIF images

No need to convert all your favorite gif images to another format as Storyboard Designer now supports gif images.

Known Issues

  • Image that uses a color key as a way of making part of the image transparent, this will not work if you are using the directFB Storyboard Engine with the 1.4.2 version of DirectFB. This problem is fixed in version 1.4.9 of DirectFB

  • Open GL ES sbengine does not properly clip rotated images.

  • Timers only re-adjust their time after firing from the current delay

  • The Storyboard Lua API call gre.set_layer_attrs_global(key_name, table) will fail silently if the layer whose attributes are being adjusted is not present on the current screen. A work around to this issue is to include the layer on the screen, but to mark it as hidden.