Archive for General
Creating Random Menus, or random anything!
Scripting Random Menus
A new tutorial on the site deals with a number of ideas for making random menus appear for the user. You might well ask what the point is in making this kind of thing, but it is all about enriching the user experience for your disc.
Consider the scenario where you want to reveal slightly different information each time the user visits a particular menu. Or how about adding an easter egg button to only one menu in a set of 10? What about just for visual interest, changing the background image every time that menu is accessed?
The tutorial shows you ways of achieving all of these things, and with your own ideas added in to the mix there is a lot that can be done to improve the quality of your projects. There are files available for download, and the scripting is all explained in the tutorial. It’s very short, and pretty simple, but does rely on using the ‘Item Values’ for menus. If you are not sure about this, you can find out more about item values on this site, too!
Click Here to get to the new tutorial, or follow the links on the left!
Comments Gone?
I am sorry to say that after a recent database upgrade the comments have sadly been deleted… we have lost all of those brilliant comments from the users. This is a bit of a tragedy, to say the least, and I apologise if your comment has now gone into the ether. Please feel free to add more if you can!
Quiz creation, subtitles and languages
It’s been a long time since the last update here, but there has beena lot going on in the background. One of the main pieces of interest is a DVD which has a language selection mechanism on first pay, and combines three audio tracks with three subtitle tracks and an alternative video track as well! Just thinking through the combinations of playback - a set up and resume system, shoing the right subtitles even if the user changes half way through and then switches to the alternate video track too…
Secondly, creating a four player quiz has been taking a lot of time, too. This has been a real challenge, making sure that the right player (or team of players) gets their turn, that scores are kept and that the questions are random. It has been incredibly interesting, to say the least.
As soon as practical, I’ll develop some sample projects and tutorials for these two scenarios and post them here for people to read.
Play All 3 - just three scripts to play all!
A new tutorial has been added to the site which looks at how you can use just three scripts to cover any number of tracks and stories in your project and make sure you get a reliable ‘play all’ situation.
This is very different from the earlier scripted example, which uses a script for every track to sort out the end jump and allows you to use the exact track names in your project. This is excellent for when you want a simple system that is easy to follow and does what you expect. However, if you are ready to move on with your scripting, this tutorial introduces you to using item values from your project. The advantage is that you don’t need to worry about track names, you can add as many tracks as you like and it will still work with no additional lines of code needed. You *do* need to edit a line in each script, but that’s a very small job!
Have a look here:
Advanced Scripting Techniques, Random Playback Scripts
A new tutorial exploring the use of advanced scripting techniques has been created, which uses bit based techniques to generate a random number and jump to a track or story. It checks to see if the track or story has been played before and if so generates a new random number.
The tutorial is theoretical, and doesn’t have a set of files to download yet, but looks at how to track up to 40 tracks/stories. This means that the tracking has to use 40 bit slots, or two and a half registers, leaving the remainder for calculations. This is more than enough, and in fact twice the number of clips could be tracked using this technique.
As it is only theoretical, there may be some flaws in the scripts, but it is offered as a starting point for experimentation and discussion. It uses fairly basic maths for the most part, but makes use of the ‘AND’ operator to compare two GPRMs. Previously, the ‘and’ has been used almost exclusively on this site to mask off different sets of bits.
The tutorial can be found here:
http://www.dvdstudiopro.co.uk/scripting-advanced-random-playback/
