I want to make one of those animated cartoon characters for my desktop. The art and animation are the easy part, but how do I get it to work with my computer to run on my desktop? Is there a site I should visit for information? Is there a program especially for this purpose? Thank you

Hi Tempest.

If you don''t find anything on the net to your liking, I wrote a Windows recycle bin replacement app a few years ago that allowed animation as part of its skinnable mode. The default skin was of a marching "monster" (the Lompster ) whose belly would balloon out when you deleted something to the bin. It used what are normally called bitstrips; basically a bmp file that contains a series of frames that the app cycles through for animation.

It didn''t allow for window movement but I think I could easily retrofit it so that it does. The one nice thing I remember about it is that it supported alpha-blending to the desktop on all versions of Windows. Drop me a line if you''re interested and I''ll see if I can''t dig it up and email it to you.

Thanks for the reply. That sounds like a fun program. What I have in mind is finding a way to get an animated character I have created to run around and do stuff, but I really have no idea how to bind it to Windows and get it to work over the desktop. I searched around on the web a bit, but most everything I came across was premade cartoons, and they wanted you to pay for them. I''m only interested in doing it for my own amusement, I don''t expect to get anything else out of it.
Just wonder if there is a place someone might suggest I start.
Thanks a lot!

Look into the Microsoft Agent Control.
It''s fun to play around with, and takes out all the hassle of drawing on the desktop, which can be quite tricky with overlapping windows and such.