A collection of assets for developing Pro Motion plugins.
A “plugin” is an external program that can be executed by Pro Motion to provide additional functionality to the application. The whole idea behind plugins is to enable end users to extend the functionality of Pro Motion to meet their personal needs and workflow.
Plugins are a powerful customization feature which can be leveraged to optimize productivity. For example, video games developers could create ad hoc plugins to optimize integration between Pro Motion and their game engine, to support custom image/animation formats, or to seamlessly update the assets pipeline from within PM user interface.
Programmers can create their own plugins to enable PM to load and save file formats that are not natively supported by the application, or to carry out some specific image processing tasks. Whichever your needs might be, the Pro Motion plugins interface is flexible enough to accomodate them.
Pro Motion has two simple plugin interfaces:
| File I/O |
These plugins are automatically added to the load/save dialogs of either image or animation files. |
| Manipulation |
These plugins are programs that can access and modify the bitmap and palette data of the images/animations currently open in PM. |
The following documents are available on this topic:
- Developer Interface
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The official Pro Motion plugin interface documentation by Jan Zimmerman, covering both file I/O and manipulation plugins.
The following documents are available on this topic:
- Pro Motion File I/O Plugin Interface
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A language agnostic presentation of the file I/O interface, by Tristano Ajmone.
The current plugins manipulation interface leverages Windows DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange) protocol to exchange data between Pro Motion (the DDE-Server) and the plugin (the DDE-client).
The following documents are available on this topic:
- Pro Motion DDE Plugin Interface
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Adaptation of the official Pro Motion Developer Interface by Jan Zimmerman, reproducing only the section on manipulation plugins.
- Pro Motion DDE Interface in C
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C implementation and tutorial of Pro Motion DDE plugin interface, by Thiadmer Riemersma.
For up-to-date information, please refer to the official documentation at Cosmigo website: