Xion Community

I'm working on my first skin which I want to enter into the skinning contest. I'm having a few issues with certain things I want to do with the skin.

The basic design is a circle UI with a single button the centre. Clicking the button causes the button and a centre piece to fade out revealing the main player area in the bg. I also wanted the detailing on this bit (i.e. buttons sliders and info) to fade in after the centre piece was gone. For now I've made a working solution which involves using 2 interfaces. The first one simply has the main UI image and the button, the button is set to load interface. When it's clicked, the next interface loads, and that has an animation which starts off with the same image as the prefious interface, and it fades out. There's also a copy of the main bg without any details, which then also fades out, to simulate a fake animation of the details coming into view.

I have an example of the animation here to explain it better:

As it is, the skin works ok, but ideally I'd prefer to just have one interface.
What I need to be able to do is have the activation button hide both itself and the cover piece at the same time and activate the animation.
Is it possible to do that?

yep
give them all the same id, use the keywords to hide them with a fadeout etc..
keep your base layers underneath that you want to be kept visible at the end of the animation

I've made a bit of progress. One thing I'm confused by is where the put the _normal/_over/_down strings. My normal state button, for example, currently is this:
id(startup) modify(startup) aclahide_normal
But I'm assuming that's the wrong syntax? The button functions ok, just doesn't show the mouseover and pressed states. I also tried putting it as modify_normal instead, to no effect.

I just tried:
button_normal id(startup) modify(startup) aclahide

The states work now, but the button now remains rather than hides itself. Although the other layer hides fine.

Mark_McQ Wrote:I just tried:
button_normal id(startup) modify(startup) aclahide

The states work now, but the button now remains rather than hides itself. Although the other layer hides fine.

Hi Mark,

I just tried reproducing that here and it seems as though you've found a bug!

If you add a _down layer, then it doesn't hide correctly. If you only use _normal and _over it works as intended.

For a work around, you could try dropping the _down layer.

Alternatively, you may be able to setup an animation sequence to force hiding of the layer. I'll leave that up to SLoB to explain as he now uses them all the time. If you'd like a head start, here's the thread I made about using this kind of thing -> http://xion.r2.com.au/community/vwtpc.php?t=95

(Instead of stopping each frame, you'd use the frames to execute the hide command then stop the animation)

If you can't figure it out, post back and I'll make you an example.

Good luck for the competition!

Cliff

Ah, I think I see. Essentially the animation frames are empty layers, and they're simply there so that when the animation runs it activates each command in turn?

Mark_McQ Wrote:Ah, I think I see. Essentially the animation frames are empty layers, and they're simply there so that when the animation runs it activates each command in turn?

Exactly

Cliff

yea so on any of the frames in the animation you can trigger off different events, any probs you can email me the skin with the issue and i'll check it out and give you the reason/solutions why