FAQ: Graphics and Sound Abilities
Last updated at 9:17 pm UTC on 9 February 2003
What kind of Graphics and Sound Capabilities does Squeak have?
Graphics:
Squeak's standard graphic model is based on BitBlt (copying rectangular areas of the screen and off-screen pixmaps using boolean functions) which is extended by operations for line drawing, text display, and affine transformations: scaling, rotating, etc. This works for 1,2,4,8,16 and 32 bit depth. Classes are in the image to read GIF and JPEG images. As JPEG was a tad slow, it has been turned into a Plugin.
Andreas Raab has implemented an entirely new, vector-based rendering engine (Balloon) which can for example display Flash 3 files. He has also added 3D support to Balloon. This is the basis for a port of Alice, a powerful 3D animation environment (see Squeak Alice).
For a more complete list of supported formats, see Multimedia Format Support.
Sound:
Squeak does sampled and synthesized sounds with stereo positioning and reverb. All sound classes are written in Smalltalk and compiled to C, so you could (in principle) add your own sound classes (for example speech synthesis: Squeak speaks!) with appropriate primitives which would fit well into the framework. See also Sound and music.
