Help With Object Bar 2 - We're back

we try to please

what is the problem with the animation?

would the tactic alexandria used in the aquarium skin work? from the look of it, the effect of only animating part of the window border comes from simply making the non-animated parts the same across all frames.

/me wonders if this is still a Jafo free zone, thus a spelling free for all

i didnt get to the menu last night, but hopefully i will make some progress tonight.

in the mean time, if you open IE into object edit, can you save it out as a file? the idea hear is that we can have a look at the file and see exactly which bit has been opened. the file size should give us an initial guide to work from.

Well, as far the animation, I probably want the impossible. The effect I would like to achieve is as follows. I want the frames to change the colors (which they do), but without the jumping part. Then I want my design which is different shapes on top of the frames to just glitter.

I will try opening IE in object edit and see what happens. However, when it throws me into object edit, I just get a bunch of gibberish.

ahha!
a bunch of giberish in object edit is basically exactly what i would expect, since you almost certinally havent opened a text file.

just try opening a graphic file in object edit for comparison
/me *wicked grin*

starone - I probably want the impossible.

have you tried threatening to tickle people until they give in and let you have your way?

worked for me

starone - I want the frames to change the colors (which they do), but without the jumping part. Then I want my design which is different shapes on top of the frames to just glitter.

the jumping part?
that suggests that the frames of animation are not all the same size, or that you have told your skin that it has the wrong frame size, or the wrong frame count.

/me thinks we need a bigger language

this would be much easier with more wiggle graphics - quick line drawing sketch type of things

you should be able to overlay a sparkle effect by just adding the components of the sparkle to the current set of animation frames. the only down side is that the sparke would be in sync with the color changes.

i am not quite sure i know what you mean about the rest of it though.

have you ever head of the UIS3 format?

i have seen rumors. it is supposed to be a much more powerful skinning language - more complex to of course. i dont know if it has been released yet though. perhaps this is a road to explore.

Boy, there you go teasing me - mention of a UIS3 and I can't get my hands on it. You have certainly peaked my curiosity.

I have 21 frames for each side. My frame sizes are as follows:

TopFrame=21
LeftFrame=21
RightFrame=21
BottomFrame=21
TopTopHeight=48
TopBotHeight=20
LeftTopHeight=20
LeftBotHeight=48
RightTopHeight=20
RightBotHeight=48
BottomTopHeight=48
BottomBotHeight=20
TOPStretch=0
LEFTStretch=0
RIGHTStretch=0

That's exactly what is happening - the sparkle is in sync with the color changing & frame dancing. I would even settle for the color changing and sparkle sync and no frame dancing. (This is getting to be comical. - I'm starting to laugh hyterically. I think I'm on the verge of loosing it.)

i am not *just* a big tease you know!

i dont really recognise these components, so i will go hunting for some comparisons in a little bit, and see what i can see.

it may be a silly question, but you have made sure that all your frames for a given side are the same size havent you?

as for loosing it, whats so terrible about that? sanity is over-rated anyway

well, i have now had a look at two WB skins that i know to be animated, and was slightly surprised to find that all 4 borders are animated, since these skins only appear to animate one border.

however, since you have provided numbers for all of the borders, i presume that you have done this yourself.

is this jumping effect on only one border, or on all of them? or is the whole actual window its self moving as well?

last night i managed to get one smartbutton working on the XPCopper skin.

the code you had provided was supposed to produce several buttons, and WB even said there were several of them, but i just couldnt get more than one at a time to work

however, having got a quick launch menu button working, it did fire off IE correctly. no real surprise there, but this way we can agree on a minute set of UIS code to add to any skin to test this problem. this can then be posted, and we can see if anyone else can reproduce your problem.

No, the entire frame moves. I'm in the process of trying a different approach with the animation and see what happens.

Are the buttons numbered correctly? I just gave you what I had in my uis file so you may have to modify the button numbers to match your experiments. All of them do appear for me and all work but the menu items.

Yeah, progress at last. Finally got my frames to stop jumping - they stand still and change colors. Now to go for the added animation (holding my breath). You were right about the size of the frame. Somehow my graphic was off on one of the sides. It was driving me crazy. I think the animation will be pretty neat if I can pull it off. Anyway, it will be one less headache.

By the way, I feel a growing thread in the progress. What can I say?

you could say that you are a prowd mommy

/me wonders how long before we get another "have you seen them" thread in our honor

i am not sure why the smart buttons didnt work.

they seemed to be numbered correctly. however, i did have to move them around a bit since the skin i was experimenting with was a different shape. however i thought that i had done all of them correctly. i may have another look at some point

in the mean time, if you load IE via your menu, and save it out as a file, how big is it?

Well, when I added the additional animation my frames started jumping again. So dropped that for the time being and went on to another endeavor and saving it for later.

As far as the honor, they may say been there and done that.

its been days!

are you feeling up to returning to this menu question yet?

You bet! Thought you had given up on it. Me, well, been working on this new skin and am just about done. Mainly tweaking. Took out the menu button since I can't seem to get it to work and will try again in the next one. I figure eventually it's got to work, question is will it be Skin #3, #4 or #5?. In the meantime, if you gain any insight, post quickly.

well, it looks like the latest version of WB (3.19b) may be safe on this machine, which will help with making progress.

now all i need to do is to is find some working UIS smart button code to play with.

Yeah, you're back on the scene! Glad you could leave the chocolate planet and come visit. Hope you have some success with this darn menu thing.

right, having managed to just about recover from works latest attempt to squash me, it is time to return to this!

first the good news. i have managed to get a working smart bars skin on this machine, which will help a lot in tracking down things (i hope).

i would like you to add the following block to the top of your origional XPCopper.uis file. this way we are using the same (fairly basic) skin with the same modifications. helps to reduce the variables. also this is a win98 machine, which is closer to your machine to.

[SmartButton0]
Enabled=1
Name0=Quick Launch Menu
Dll0=quickl.wbp
Author0=Neil Banfield
WIDTH0=20

[SmartButton.aot]
Image=XPCopper\Button.bmp

[Button6]
Align=1
XCoord=210
YCoord=5
ALpha=254
Width=24
Height=24
Action=-3
Visibility=0
DllName=smart.dll
ButtonImage=XPCopper\Button1.bmp
SmartButtonNumber=0

i have tested it here. simply copy and pasting this into the top of the UIS file produces an interesting down pointing arrow button near the middle of the title bar.

when i use this quick menu to access IE it loads correctly here. so still cannot reproduce your effect *shrug*

i dont surpose you use Gimp do you?

i have started playing around with desktopX over the last couple of days.

however, i cannot get JScript to work

so in the mean time i thought i would have a look at doing more basic things first. however the problem now is i need graphics to do anything.

so, i have gimp, but no idea of how to use it

Try this feline
http://www.gimp.org/tutorials.html

/me hugs Doreen
i hadnt found that one yet.
i have found a link to a 20meg zip of a manual, which i will download soon.

now all i need is some time to read all this

where have you been hiding? havent seen you around here recently.

Sorry, I'm just now getting to the message board. Been collaborating with Loidiboid on a skin and finally got it uploaded to the GUI.

Gimp??? Sounds pretty foreign to me. Where are you coming up with all these names - very active imagination you have. Now graphics I understand. If I can help you out in anyway in that area just let me know.

Have saved the info above and will get back with you on that. To be honest, I haven't had much chance in really looking at the menu thing again, but hopefully I know have a breather (unless you have me working on graphics anyway.)

/me *innocent as the driven snow*

gimp is a graphics program. it is supposed to be deeply powerful, and is free.

i am working on the basis that i stand a better chance with gimp than with skinstudio.

worst case scenario i can always download and read the source code for gimp
/me *mannic giggle*