communicating with forms

[munzner]

The short answer is no. You can only communicate with a running
Animator process through the control panel. 

However, the following kludge comes to mind is this: animate does
accept command-line options. You could do something like this:

(transform g0 g0 g0 rotate .2 0 0)
(backcolor allcams 1 0 0)
# play through once. don't even show animate panel.
(emodule-run "animate -s 50 -p -o -hide -f /u/gcg/ngrap/data/geom/[a-e]*.off")
(shell "/etc/killall animate")
(transform g0 g0 g0 rotate -1 0 0)
(sleep-for 5)
(backcolor allcams 0 1 0)
(delete World)
# start up animator again, with the same files, in bounce mode.
(emodule-run "animate -s 50 -p -b -f -hide /u/gcg/ngrap/data/geom/[a-e]*.off")
(sleep-for 10)
(shell "/etc/killall animate")
(backcolor allcams 0 0 1)

Of course, when you restart the animator it reloads all the files,
which could take a while if you have a lot of geometric data.

There is a facility in the GCL to pass messages to a running emodule
(emodule-transmit), but unfortunately the Animator doesn't currently
listen for anything...

Tamara Munzner          ((555) 555-5555
munzner at geom.umn.edu    The Geometry Center