[Niels]

Thanks a lot Alex! It’s funny, Merge Layer is something that has been on our todo-list since the very beginning. We have kept pushing it, because other stuff seemed more important – even though a merge layer feature is obviously important and necessary. The funny thing is, that you are the only one ever mentioning it. Nobody else has asked about it, so that’s why we have kept postponing it – making all the other features instead. 😉 Apparently people did not need Merge Layer. 😀

The Alpha 8 release is super close. Merge Layer will be part of the release after that, which is the first beta.

[Niels]

I like it a lot! It’s great! Thanks for showing it.

[Niels]

Hi John,

If I understand you correctly, you want to do animation in Animation Paper – and you want to make sure they will display properly on your WordPress website?

No problem! When you work in Animation Paper, you save your scene as an .ap file. This is the best format for saving everything and loading it back into Animation Paper again if you want to continue your work.

When you are finished, you will want to export your animation. You go to File -> Export -> Movie Clip and select MP4. MP4 is a great format for compatibility and very good for displaying on websites, including yours.

Let me know if you have further questions.

Cheers,
Niels

[Niels]

Thanks for your input – much appreciated!

Maybe you are already aware of this, Animation Paper does already have a kind of clever stabiliser build in, working at all times. But it doesn’t have any user options. It is different compared to others way of doing it, where it is merely some kind of smoothing/dampening.

But I appreciate why many people would like to have exactly that – especially because they are used to it from other software. Can you try to describe what exactly it is you are looking for in a stabiliser? Interesting for me to know and learn. We might be able to do something 😉

Shape tools like rectangle and circles I have steered away from deliberately in order to keep things simple and “analogue” in feel. I don’t want too much “technical” stuff, numbers, percentages, vector points, etc – if it can be avoided. Basically freehand drawing is what’s emphasised. I hope you see my point. However, I actually have straight lines on our todo – I see how they could be helpfull and done in a simple none-cluttering way.

Anyway, thanks a lot for your nice words. Let me know what your further thoughts are.

Best,
Niels

[Niels]

Wow, thanks for sharing all this Herb. Fun and interesting read. I’m sure many of us have similar stories to tell. I had a Commodore PET like your brother, but real creativity for my part came when I got the Commodore 64. 😉 I did my first “character animation” on that and several of my own software and tools. 🙂

Would be interesting to know how you see the future of all this. What do you think is next for you and for the animation world?

Cheers,
Niels

[Niels]

I’m sure it did – and does! Thank you!

[Niels]

Sorry Herb, the guy you replied to is a spammer. I’ve shown him out. 😉 I constantly have to remove obvious and bad spam on this forum. It just happened that the subject of his spam here was somewhat within the subject – and not some escort agency in Delhi. 😀

[Niels]

You are definitely not boring me Alessio! 🙂 I am just sad that we can’t make it work for you – and you are in this situation where you want to upgrade your system, but can’t because of other good software running only on Win7.

I hope you find a good solution that’s hopefully not too expensive. Thank you and good luck to you too!

[Niels]

Actually, I can see from our installation records, that a few Win7 users did actually manage to install and run Animation Paper. So at least for some it does work.

I have now dug up three old releases we’ve made. Maybe there’s a change one of them will work for you. Worth a try at least.

Here’s Alpha 1, Alpha 3 and Alpha 5…

https://www.dropbox.com/s/a0txhtiwegwyo19/AnimationPaper-Alpha1_x64.msi?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/4dp34or7qlw20pm/AnimationPaper-Alpha3_x64.exe?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/irenqfien91oage/AnimationPaper-Alpha5_x64.exe?dl=0

Fingers crossed!

[Niels]

Sorry for the delay. It was only in the very beginning of development we may have supported Win 7. Any early version that can actually be used is not running on Win 7 – I’m sorry. We are using QT as our framework, and they set the level of compatibility. Nothing I can do to change that. I’m truly sorry it doesn’t work for you.

And by the way, the reason that we have this license system is because we need to test every aspect of the software. Animation Paper is free in the alpha and beta stage – but will eventually be paid software that has to have some license system – this has to be tested on a lot of users and different hardware like everything else in Animation Paper.

[Niels]

OK – Thanks for the info! Much appreciated.

I can’t remember off the top of my head if/when we had a version for Win7. Actually I could have thought it would just work on 7. I better check this and get back to you… 😉

[Niels]

OK thank you very much. So it’s apparently not something with your computer – rather than maybe something with your connection. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it, just something that makes it different and causes our server to not connect it for some weird reason.

Our server should of course work with everybody.

I don’t think there’s anything else you can do. I will try to work more on it…

[Niels]

Oh, sorry. Don’t do that 😉 Could it be some high restrictions of a firewall or something at your end? I’m lost I know 🙁 Do you have other computers online by any chance? Just to test the connection from there and try to hopefully get some kind of clue…

My goal is to try to reveal if there’s anything we have missed on our end about the connections to/from our server. I shoot in the dark in the hopes something fundamental shows up – that we will then be able to improve.

Thanks for your time!

[Niels]

Cool. Alright – that’s interesting. I haven’t been looking into those aspects that much. Thanks!

[Niels]

Thanks for the screenshot. I’m really sorry Alessio, I don’t understand what would cause this. I admit that something is going on. I’m glad this only happens to very few people, but still, there are people experiencing this – like you do.

I encourage you to keep trying again – you don’t need to register again, just launch AP and paste the activation key in to see if it accepts it. And please get back to me either way. If people do not return to me after I advice them to just try again – I tend to think their problem is solved. So I need to know if you keep getting the “unable to connect” error. Thank you.

I hope your situation can end up giving us a clue to what this is all about.

Cheers,
Niels