🚀 go-pugleaf

I bought the Macintosh verson of Playmation, and I'm not entirely
satisfied with it.

Playmation is available on the Amiga, the Macintosh, and Windows. It's
originally an Amiga program, and it's kept its Amiga style user interface
as it's moved from machine to machine.

Pros:
 * Cheap! $300, plus another $100 if you want the not-yet-released 24-bit
renderer.
 * Superb character animation features. You can use animated motions as
subroutines. You can edit the individual surface definition points. You
can use a "spine" to quickly animate complex objects.
 * Nice incremental redraw in modeler.
 * Spline surfaces. No more jaggy polygons.
 * Supports QuickTime
 * Comes with lots of sample models and animations.
 * Comes with a tutorial video.
 * Files are ASCII, and they provide limited documentation of the file
format on their BBS system.

Cons:
 * Weird user interface. Doesn't work like a Mac program. Limited Undo.
 * Comes in five stand-alone pieces. (Model objects, apply surface
attributes, combine objects into actors and design animation subroutines,
combine actors, render.)
 * Crashes all the time. (This is the first release; quality may improve
in time.)
 * Has trouble rendering; often fails part-way through an animation. Some
of the sample animations, like "Desert" are too complex to render at all.
(You get a dialog box which says "111". How helpful.) This isn't a memory
or Init or CPU problem, or at least it shows up on both a IIci with 8M
and a Quadra 950 with 32M.
 * Slow renderer. Only allows ray-tracing.
 * Only renders 320 x 200 x 8, which is pretty crude by Mac standards.
 * Crashes if run from a disk other than the boot disk.
 * If you put up the large preview screen on a 640 x 480 monitor, the
window controls, including the close box, are off the screen, so you
can't close it. (Makes it hard to do anything else with the program, as
well.)