Odd-shaped buttons . . .

[Devin Asay]

On Feb 4, 2009, at 7:07 AM, Richmond Mathewson wrote:

> One criticism that has been levelled against Runtime Revolution
> is that it seems to provide no way of making non-rectangular buttons.
>
> Of course one can make PGN and GIF images with transparent areas;
> but this doesn't really help if one wants to make (for instance) an
> interactive piece with adjacent, odd-shaped objects.
>
> Many years ago my boys had a Dorling-Kindersly CD with a map
> of the world, and, infantile chap that I am, I spent hours
> clicking extremely near to the boundaries of the respective
> borders of countries on the map: and, guess what, they were
> country-shaped buttons. That was in 1996 (!!!!!!), and the CD
> had been built with MacroMedia Authorware.
>
> Now, 12 years later, it might not be a bad idea if we could catch
> up with MacroMedia (well, at least in this respect) and find a way to
> produce odd-shaped buttons . . .
>
> Thoughts, Solutions (um?), Ideas . . .

Richmond,

I had the same issue (exactly the same as it turns out) a couple of  
years back. I was making a demo matching exercise for my students in  
which they were to drag country names onto a map with the country  
outlines. It turns out that Rev can handle this beautifully! The key,  
I found after some searching, is to use the within() function, rather  
than the 'is within' operator, to do the boundary checking. As it  
turns out, 'is within' only considers the rectangle of the object,  
while within(), when applied to image objects, only returns true if  
the location you're checking is within a non-transparent area of the  
image.

To see how my demo turned out, run the following in the message box:

go stack URL "http://asay.byu.edu/MatchingExKey.rev"

Regards,

Devin


Devin Asay
Humanities Technology and Research Support Center
Brigham Young University