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You have learnt one way of animating an object, so here is the other way. The way to do it is to place individual frames of the animation side by side. The aim of this section is make an object that is a blinking eye for the lizard at the top of the screen. The image you can download on the left is a series of 48 images, each sized 21x21 pixels, side by side. The actual animation only actually requires about 6 or 7 images, but you can't add timings to each frame individually so I've had to pad it out to get the timing right. |
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You can create an object as normal, and use this image as the source for the appearance. If you leave things like this you will have one looooooong thin image, so it's back to the Animation tab to fix that. The first thing to do is specify the number of frames. This times it's physical frames unlike the 'alpha blending' frames as you specified in the previous example, so you enter 48. I have extended the interval slighly as this seems to look a bit better. This is not a static image (1 frame), so this remains unchecked, but I want the animation to loop indefinitely so I have checked the 'Loop' box. You should
now have an object which is a blinking eye |
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This will be your first experience in the use of plugins and is fairly gentle introduction. If you create an object you need to go to the 'General' tab and look at the 'General Plugin' section. If you have opened a theme previously which includes a mail plugin the appropriate plugin will be available from the drop down list. It should be there as it is included in the Default theme. Once you have done this you can click on the 'Information' button to view how the plugin functions. Don't worry if you don't understand it all because we're going to go through it now. To start setting up your mail plugin click on the 'Configure' button. |
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If you have set up a mail reader before you are likely to be familiar with the parameters which are used for accessing mail over the Internet. You typically need a server name to contact, and your login name and password. If you don't have this information to hand, it is typically available on the website of your mail prover or Internet service provider. Once you have this information you can enter it into to fields here. One thing to note is that the mail password is not encrypted, so if you share the object or your theme you must remember to delete this information or everyone will soon be reading your mail! |
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The next thing to do is to set up the appearance of the object. The information about the plugin stated that it activates one of two states depending on whether there is mail waiting for you or not. From the 'Appearance' section you are able to add 2 states. If you do this, and give them the reference numbers indiated in the instructions you are in a position to set up an appearance for each message. You can used the following graphic as the source for each one. Graphically you can apply the same effect as you did for the button rollovers.You can fade in the image when there is mail (state 7805932) using alpha transparency animation, and have the reverse (fading out) if there is no mail. The final thing to do is to reset the 'Default' state so there is no default image. |
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It makes sense this if you object tells you you have mail, you then want to be able to access it. To do this, just define it's class to be whatever you want to access your mail, so when you click the mail object, you can get your mail. The two likely alternatives are to access a URL if you use webmail, or launch the software you use to read your mail. If you use this second option, you can either launch the programme directly, or use the more flexible option based on the file extension. Most email readers are associated with the '.eml' extention, so if you enter this as your shortcut it should lauch the right programme. You can use this elsewhere, for example, creating a shortcut to '.txt' would launch ObjectEdit, Notepad or whatever else you use to launch text files. Once you have put this object in position, beneath the lizard's mouth you are done so I think you deserve another download. |
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and all you need to do is give it a name, set it's parent to 'Tree - Top'
and place it over the static eye which is part of the 'Tree - Top' object.
A location of 305,15 should be about right.
