Jeanne A. E. DeVoto wrote:
> Can you say a bit about what you mean by a flip book? The flip books I'm
> familiar with are a form of animation based on showing succeeding frames -
> is this what you mean?
Mark is referencing a process used in iShell. (I know Mark from that crowd -
Hi Mark!).
Ishell has a built in capability to take a single image that contains
multiple button states, separate states are each contained in a "cell" which
is the same size - sort of an image that is a table of images. Note that it
can contain, and usually does contain, an alpha channel as well.
Flipbooks are used in many ways in iShell, but one of the most common is for
buttons. The standard state of a button may be (row1, column 1), but you can
easily change states say by mouse over. In Rev terms it would probably look
like -
On mouseOver
Set the state of flipbook "myButton" to (row2, column 1)
-- this shows a highlighted state for the button
End mouseOver
Or something like that.
The process, when I first used it, was a bit clumsy. It turns out that it is
pretty convenient to keep all of your custom buttons in a single image,
though. I have seen VERY large interfaces that use a single flipbook (which
can be made in any supported graphic format), for the entire interface and
ALL of it's components. Load that single image to memory, and after that -
no disk access for interface components.
Note that one of the cool features is that iShell determines cell size for
you. When you load a flipbook, you tell iShell that it has so many rows, and
so many columns - after that you just tell it the table position you want to
use - no pixel dimensions or any other information required.
And finally - yes, flipbooks can also be used for simple animation. It's a
simple matter to instruct iShell to cycle through a range of cells.
I hope that clarifies the question - and I would join Mark in saying that
this is a feature that those of us coming over from iShell would love to
see. It's also one of the reasons I continue to use iShell for more
graphical based applications.
--
Troy
RPSystems
www.rpsystems.net
