Visual Effects

[richmond62]

HOWEVER: I thought I understood the words 'right', 'left', 'vertical', and 'horizontal': but it seems, in terms of xTalk at least, I was wrong.

[tperry2x]

I dunno what programming language that:

I'd expect the correct behaviour to be the Windows one, as:

is written in, but it doth not speak to me at all.

That is part of the engine, in C++ code.
you can see there are three case statements in there (and one for dealing with if it's unhandled). It has no case statement for right or left, so that's why it can't currently do that.
It does get a bit more complicated, a bit further on, but that's the short version.

[richmond62]

It has no case statement for right or left

Aha: so that is, presumably, why the LC Dictionary tells LIES.

And there I was, naive as ever, thinking the thing was ONLY outdated.

[richmond62]

As I am at work today I do NOT have access to my G3 iMac with MacOS 9.2.2 so I cannot see if HyperCard or HyperStudio managed left-right transitions: but I suspect they could.

MCUnreachable()

makes me suspect that when the MetaCard people made a UNIX clone of HyperCard left-right transitions got lost.

The left-right transitions work in Hyperacrd (just tested in that emulator).

[tperry2x]

The left-right transitions work in Hyperacrd (just tested in that emulator).

Just to confirm, I mean the left/right transitions for that effect only.
visual effect "push right" or visual effect "push left" works fine for example.

What I mean is, visual effect "stretch to right" doesn't because there's nothing in there to describe what to do if "right" is specified, on that effect.

[richmond62]

Aha: so the LC Dictionary is not lying (well, in this respect) as it only mentions:

stretch from bottom|from center|from top

and

shrink to bottom|to center|to top

and

Code: Select all

scroll right

and

Code: Select all

scroll left

work as advertised.
-

SShot 2025-01-13 at 15.18.44.png (90.77 KiB) Viewed 2078 times

[tperry2x]

Aha: so the LC Dictionary is not lying (well, in this respect)...
and

Code: Select all

scroll right

and

Code: Select all

scroll left

work as advertised.

Yes, those work fine.
I may look at building some more visual effects when I get a moment, but will need a bit of experimentation.

edit: some experimentation:

concertina.gif (134.36 KiB) Viewed 2054 times

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on mouseUp
   visual effect concertina
   go next
end mouseUp

[richmond62]

SShot 2025-01-14 at 10.10.26.png (121.95 KiB) Viewed 2003 times

[tperry2x]

This just executes the scroll right effect, waits until that's done - then stretches from top.
It won't process them together at the same time, so you get one transition happening after the other.

(Transitions only stack one after the other unfortunately, they can't work alongside eachother at the same time). I seem to remember Supercard was capable of that.

[richmond62]

I know: I was just feeling bloody-minded this morning: our car is snowed in so had to drag through the snow to the bus, and generally . . .

[OpenXTalkPaul]

Are you sure the page-curl doesn't work? I think that has special requirements to use the effects, they are CoreImage transitions (and not exclusive to defunct Quicktime), so I believe you have to provide some extra parameters for those to work (on MacOS only).

There's a demo stack for CoreImage that was included in the IDE, half of the examples in that stack still worked for me (on macOS 11 BigSur).

I did wrap a lot of the CoreImage image effects in Extension Builder (that's what made that animated OXT logo gif), but iirc I only set up the effects of the ones that applied to a single image. They work with image transitions but could not sure if they can be applied to card transitions. I wonder if custom 'transitions' could be scripted by using exported-to-variables images of the two cards.