User talk:Spidrgrrl

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Happy editing! AdrianHObradors (talk) 11:19, 4 April 2022 (UTC)


 * Also, wikipedia has many WikiProjects, and perhaps once you are more familiar with Wikipedia you might like checking out the  chess WikiProject (or many of the other ones here). Enjoy your stay! --AdrianHObradors (talk) 13:43, 4 April 2022 (UTC)

MediaStation related material in Disney Animated Storybook article
Hi, Spidrgrrl!

I was delighted to discover today that there is an article about Disney Animated Storybooks and MediaStation, a company that I co-founded.

I noticed some discrepancies in some edits you made in March 2022 (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Disney%27s_Animated_Storybook&oldid=1074616279) to the Disney ASB article.

This is the paragraph in question:

Media Station employee Newton Lee became one of the lead software ...

If we were to contain names in the article (which I think is not in the spirit of Wikipedia), it would be more accurate if written something like this:

Media Station employee Newton Lee became one of the lead software and title engineers for The Lion King Animated Storybook.[32] As he recalled in the book Disney Stories: Getting to Digital, "Media Station used a number of 'proprietary strategic software technologies' that made it easier for the developer to create large animation multimedia and the user to play it back, impossible until that time".[33] A playback engine was created by Henry Flurry to provide high quality playback from a CD-ROM of large animations and associated logic defined by a object-oriented scripting language similar to Macromedia's ActionScript.[33] WinToon, which Bill Wagner of Media Station previously developed for Microsoft, aided the projects by "reduc[ing] the amount of data actually required for larger animation playback".[34] The software improved performance of playback in Windows by reducing the amount of data that was required", arguing that it was necessary because "unlike other interactive storybook developers who used a palette of 256 colors throughout the entire title [hsf: I believe that this is false. Other Storybooks had fully developed animations.], Media Station used 256 colors per screen [hsf: This is also false. We used full RGB.]; this resulted in very large animation files".[33] In 1994, Lee created the compiler for the media assets and scripts that generated a CD-ROM data file readable by the cross-platform engine, which ran on both Mac and Windows. Media Station's cross-platform language, Interactive Media File Script, Title Compiler, and Asset Management Systems[35] allowed production for a Disney's Animated Storybook game to be between three and six months.[32]

---

My problem with this is that so many other critical engineer names are left out, like Glenn Golden who wrote the glue between the engine and the Mac, Bill Wagner who wrote the glue between the engine and the PC, co-founder Hal (Cicada) Brokaw, who designed much of the video side of the engine.

Also missing in this article is the disaster of a release in the first version of the Lion King, because of incompatibilities with Microsoft WinG software used by WinToon. See:

-- https://www.pcworld.com/article/535838/worst_products_ever.html

With kids opening presents on Christmas Day all across America, the phone lines circuits were overloaded to the Disney support number in Burbank, CA. Disney and MediaStation were front page material in the Wall Street Journal the next business day.

So... undocumented in the Wiki is that we removed all WinToon and WinG code and complete rewrote our own video subsystem that bypassed OS libraries and went straight to the video buffers. End result, as I'm told, was that in an industry that had a 30% return customer support call rate, we were only 3%, with almost all being user error.

Also undocumented is that Disney offered to buy us, but our board (of which I wasn't a part) turned it down, expecting to go public in 1996. When Humongous Entertainment (Freddi the Fish) posted a loss in Jan 1996, the IPO was abandoned.

Alas.

I still work for a living. :-)

I don't expect you to edit the Wiki with all of my info, but you might consider removing the names listed, or including more names.

Thanks! Henry Flurry Henryaz (talk) 01:34, 17 August 2023 (UTC)


 * I will update my " We used full RGB" statement. My recollection is that we did use compression that reduced the color space, but that was per animation, not per screen. Henryaz (talk) 01:40, 17 August 2023 (UTC)