Different platforms, different displayed effects ?

[Klaus Major]

Hi Bob,

> Many moons ago I was a sorta scripthead with SC and had to move to 
> ToolBook to keep the bills payed. I graciously accept all sympathy, 
> thanks !!

:-)

> Anyhow, I am now moving everything to Rev and am having a lot of 
> issues, unfortunately more so than going from SC to TB.   Most of the 
> problems is me having brain farts, but some of them are just weird.
> There's likely going to be a lot of obtuse questions I'll post, but to 
> start with I don't seem to get close to the same effects and/or 
> performance when going from a Mac to a PC or to other PC's.  An 
> example is the various visual effects.
> Given this;
>
> on mouseUp
>  put the textColor of fld "Foo" into Ltemp
>  set the textColor of fld "Foo" to white
>  lock screen
>  set the textColor of fld "Foo" to Ltemp
>  unlock screen with visual effect dissolve
> end mouseUp
>
> On a Mac OS-X platform the fld shows as a dissolve, but there's a 
> flash at the end

First and quick guess: Is the alwaysbuffer of your stack set to true?

> On a HP Pavilion zv500 running WinXP  it doesn't do much at all, maybe 
> a slight flash.  More like a straight "show obj".
> On a WinXP PC desktop it works OK, but grossly different in speed (of 
> dissolve) to the Mac.
>
> I certainly don't expect things to be identical or even close, but I 
> can likely script around that if I know where the problems lie.  So, 
> has anybody written notes or a paper on areas to watch when developing 
> cross platform ?

Sorry no paper, but just some thoughts:

The transition "dissolve" will use Quicktime if present!!!!!
So this might explain some of the differences you have experienced...

And you CAN control the duration of a transition!

Hint: This IS semantically challenging ;-)

"the effectrate" controls the duration that a "very slow" transition 
will take, yo :-D

So you can write:

...
set the effectrate to 500
## = 500 millisecs
visual dissolve very slow
go next cd
...

The engine will (try) to compensate the duration of 500 millisecs on 
any platform...

In your special case you can even prohibit to use QT for the dissolve 
transitions by simply:

...
set the dontuseqteffects to true
...


So you could try this examply and see if the differneces are still that 
obvious:

on mouseUp
  set the dontuseqteffects to true
  set the effectrate to 1000 ## or whatever you like
  put the textColor of fld "Foo" into Ltemp
  set the textColor of fld "Foo" to white
  lock screen
  set the textColor of fld "Foo" to Ltemp
  unlock screen with visual effect dissolve very slow
end mouseUp

> More to the point, has anybody else moved from TB to Rev and would 
> like to commiserate with me over some fine Vancouver beer ? :-P

Sorry, never touched TB, but "beer" sounds good :-)

> Thanks, Bob...

Regards

Klaus Major
klaus at major-k.de
http://www.major-k.de