Amethyst Interactive Multimedia

Because Launchpad is now free software, we will no longer have to find a new code hosting solution for Amethyst and Grandwing. Thank you Canonical for your decision. We will continue to use Launchpad.

Amethyst now includes three scripting languages. These languages are Python, Lua, and Javascript. They currently support a limited array of functions but that will grow as development continues. It has not been finalized whether all of the languages will remain in Amethyst or if any of them will require user authorization to run.

Some of the most notable changes to Amethyst recently have been layers and groups. I had recently announced layer support but it was announced as being a basic foundation being set up for later support of layers. Well, that “later support” is now actually “current support.” Also, groups have been added. Groups basically function as [...]

Grandwing’s code cleanup is coming along well. The code is much cleaner and several bugs have been fixed. Amethyst is also getting better. Although not a lot has changed this past week on Amethyst, an optimization was added that allows it to continue working even when it is waiting to display the next frame.

Layer support in Amethyst has truely began today. Before, only psuedo layer support existed. Layers were “implemented” into the AAF file format, but no more than 1 layer could be used. That’s not any different from before, eh? Now, we are working on making multiple layers possible. Currently a few things are broken, but Amethyst [...]

Tonight I’ve been working on the Amethyst settings manager. Ok, it’s not perfect, but it functions. You can force fullscreen and activate hardware acceleration from it. Settings are not yet saved, but will be in the future. Here are some screenshots:

Three new features have been added to Amethyst today. Music can now be played in Amethyst, text can be rendered, and a framerate can be set in the tag. These are three very important features for Amethyst.

Today, both Grandwing and Amethyst got some attention. Today’s focus was mainly on bugs. In Amethyst, a bug was fixed causing it to wait 1 second between every action (not frame). This created an unnecessary delay. Amethyst was also modified so that the interpreter would not directly speak with mgsdl, but send data to the [...]

I’ve been working on an interactive multimedia format and player over the past week or two called Amethyst. The goal is to make a free software player designed by the same people making the format to combat Adobe’s Flash format (they make the format and the proprietary player). Most FOSS Flash players are left at [...]