Atari Games Corporation

Frank Kuan

Dennis D Harper

The present invention comprises a method and apparatus for finely controlling the rate of animation display in applications such as a video game or simulator. In one embodiment, a floating point animation timer selectively varies or eliminates the number of update periods a video cell is to be displayed to match the display time of the script to a determined time. The determined time can be empirically chosen or dynamically calculated based on the user's input. In another embodiment a sequence table provides an array of update times corresponding to the cells in a script. The number of update times a video cell is displayed can be varied to emphasize certain actions in the animation sequence. This provides a programmer with the ability to create a variety of animation sequences from a limited number of video cells and to finely manipulate the animated character to achieve a specific action.

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San Jose, CA, United States of America

Frank Kuan