Comment 9 for bug 800113

>Do you really want an ignorant user to do that sort of programer's work? ;)
Uhm, if you consider someone who understands and edits conf-files, plus contributes with content and bug reports as an ignorant user, I'd like to know what you think of someone who merely plays the game. :p
Jokes aside, there's a lot of good suggestions in your post. I think I need to re-read it a couple of times to fully grasp all of it, but now we have a proposal to discuss at least.

To elaborate a bit more from my previous post, this will be handled by the code, but will ultimately be decided by what people write in the conf-files. Since "pause should be added" seems to vague (IMO), reaching an agreement on how it should be represented in the conf-files will make it much easier to later add in the code. The alternative is of course that some programmer implements something at random (for instance only play an animation once if "PLAY_ONCE" appear after the image_??.png part) which may not be the best long-term solution.

I agree that the animate part should be split up. Most of the entries in conf-files presently are short and descriptive enough that even I can understand most of them just by reading through the file. By adding multiple parameters, this readability would suffer, especially with multiple integer values, making harder for people who don't know conf-files to get started.

>One line each; plus it would also be easier to attach a comment explaining what this actually does.
Ideally, this would work. However, in the real world people don't write comments like this. Therefore the better option would split up the parameters in name:value pairs to "force" people to write it readable.

Also, the branches you suggest, sounds rather similar what programmers refer to as if-else or conditional statements (see description http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_(programming)#If-then.28-else.29). As such, they may add additional complexity to the conf-files, which I am not sure is the best place to handle this.

Thanks for putting the time and effort into your proposal. Keep up the good work :)