Everybody is invited to create pictures and animations for Arcade. You can either use our ArcadePaint program or create a GIF animation using a tool of your choice.
If you have created a nice picture or an interesting animation and you think it might look good on the building, please send it by email to <arcade@blinkenlights.de>. Just attach the file to your e-mail. Please state your name and e-mail address so that we can get in contact with you later. Unnecessary to explain we are not giving away your personal data.
ArcadePaint
Using the program ArcadePaint everybody can create its own pictures and animations for Arcade. The software runs on Mac OS and Windows operating systems.
ArcadePaint is a very simple program. After launching the application you can immediately start creating your animation. Just click on the windows to draw the selected brightness.
The palette in the upper right corner offers various tools to select: pencil tools in three sizes (, , ), a eyedropper tool to select a brightness directly from the image (), a fill tool (), a line tool () and two rectangle tools (, ). Below the tools you can select the desired brightness to draw with. Below that you can select the transparency with which the tools act on the canvas.
The load button is to load BML files. The save button stores the animation on disk. Using the save as button you can specify a new file name before saving. The new button creates a new animation.
The navigation arrows (|<, <, >, >|) allow browsing throught the animation forward and backward. The current frame number is displayed in the middle. The play button starts playback of the animation. The loop button determines if the animation should run in an endless loop should stop at the last frame. The i button brings up dialog to enter the title of the animation, a short description of its content and the name of the author.
To create animations just use the add, dup (duplicate) or ins (insert) buttons to add new pictures (frames). All pictures in sequence form the animation. del (delete) allows taking out a single frame. The other buttons (+, -, 1/2s, 1s) can be used to set the duration of each frame in steps of 50ms.
The copy and paste buttons allow for copying the content of a frame to another frame. Selecting clear sets the current image to black.
The buttons left, right, up and down shift the picture horizontally and vertically one by one.
GIF Animations
Animations can also be created in GIF format. Please keep the folllowing restrictions in mind.
The GIF image must be 26 pixel in width and 20 pixels in height. Please keep in mind that the windows on the BnF are twice as high as wide. The aspect ratio of 2:1 should be taken into account when creating and viewing the files. Some programs - like The GIMP - allow setting the aspect ration when editing the file.
All GIF files must be stored in greyscale format with 256 greyscale values (8 bit). We expect however, that it will be difficult to actually see more than 8 different greys on the building. We recommend using 2, 4 or 8 greyscales when designing still images. All greyscales can be used when working with smooth animated transitions.
