Custom "Widget" Technique Question

[Roger Guay]

Len et al,

I have worked on similar projects/problems and am very interested in  
sharing thoughts such as this very valuable information from Richard  
Gaskin. I use his ideas throughout, but beyond this and for a project  
very similar to what you propose, I came up with the following  
solution, which seems to work very well for simulations that are not  
too complex.

I define and build two different kind of objects: Control objects and  
Flow objects. For example, a valve would be a Control and a pipe would  
be a Flow. (Obviously you could have many different types of Controls  
and Flows.)

Next build a 2-dim "truth table" (this could be an array) with  
Controls at the top and Flows in the first column. wherever an "x"  
appears, that flow is activated when the corresponding control is  
activated. IOW, anytime a control is activated, the truth table is  
queried to determine which flows to animate.

As for the animation, I make extensive use of custom properties by  
calling the cAnimation of an object. For example I have a radial gage  
object whose cAnimation is "FRadGage t1" where FRadGage is a function  
at the stack level that moves a "pointer" graphic of the control, and  
t1 is the animation target value for the simulation.

Good luck and I hope this helps!

Roger Guay


On Sep 13, 2009, at 11:00 AM, use-revolution-request at lists.runrev.com  
wrote:

> Check out the new Behaviors in v3.5.  This will let you use a button
> script that you could put anywhere (I tend to put mine in a library  
> or a
> substack, depending on whether I plan to reuse them in other apps or
> not), and then assign the behavior of your template group to that  
> button
> script.  From then on it's really easy, since all your code is in  
> one place.
>
> Using getProp and setProp you can adjust any number of things within  
> the
> group from a single property setting.
>
> And if you use v3.5's new selectGroupedControls property for groups,  
> you
> can keep your layout work clean since the pointer tool will treat the
> group as a single object, regardless of the setting of the global
> property of the same name.
>
> Use "copy <grpDescriptor> to <destinationStackDescriptor>" to add  
> copies
> of groups to your layout.
>
> Keep us posted on how this goes.  I love simulations, and would love  
> to
> see what you come up with.
>
> --
>  Richard Gaskin
>  Fourth World