THE TIME-LAPSE MOVIE



Darwin Pond has a unique feature that lets you see an instant replay of the events that have been going on in the Pond.  You see the evolution in the whole Pond unfolding rapidly before your eyes.  The Time-lapse Movie shows a fast-paced animation of swimmers and food moving around in the pond, starting from the moment you loaded up the pond to the latest time tick.  Swimmers are shown as colored dots and food is shown as smaller green dots.  



To run the time-lapse movie, go to the Options menu and select "Time-lapse Movie".  A dialog box will appear with the following controls: 



PLAY

REWIND

STOP

EXIT



Press Play and the movie begins to play.  At any time you can Stop or Rewind the movie.  When you are done watching the movie, select Exit.



Recording the Time-lapse Movie

In order to create a time-lapse movie, Darwin Pond has to periodically save images of the pond to a temporary file (every 200 time ticks).  This file grows larger and larger as the program runs.  This file is created as soon as you load up a new pond.  It disappears as soon as you exit Darwin Pond.  Its purpose is to store frames to be animated whenever you play the movie.  



Since this file takes up space on your hard drive, you can decide the maximum size this file can become before it stops growing by going to the Options menu and selecting Preferences.  There you will find five settings for the Time-lapse movie:



Off       Short       Medium        Long         Unlimited   



If you choose Off, there will be no file and the Time-lapse movie feature will be disabled.  If you choose Short, Medium, or Large, a time-lapse movie file will be created and its size (and hence, the duration of the movie) is constrained (the approximate file size is explained in the dialog box).  If you choose Unlimited, the time-lapse movie file will grow until it cannot grow anymore.  