Animation

An animation can be played when you press a button or enter a menu. You can animate the whole menu or just a group of objects - an animation group.

NOTES:

• An animation does not close the popup menu - you have to call the [Close popup] action manually.
• Fade animation has problems on the PS3 - please read the warning in the Fade section.

Animation for button actions

To assign an animation to a button action, select the corresponding line under the button action and click the button on the right:

You can add an animation to any user action. By default, the animation is played before the action is executed, but you can change this behavior for some types of actions.

Animation for menu

Enter animation - the animation that is played when the menu is entered. You can jump to the menu directly or through any of the predefined animations.

Edit animation window

Type - the type of the animation. It can be:

• Fade
• Slide
• Scale
• Clip
• Hide menu - a 4-frame animation that can be used simply to hide the menu. This is useful when you don't need an animation but want to hide the menu before starting a movie. Recommended for the Two Titles/Three Titles modes.

Animate - here you specify what to animate: the whole menu, a single group of objects, or the selected state of the button (for button action animations only).

Number of frames - the duration of the animation in frames.

Tween type - described here.

Swap values (<>) - swaps the values between "from" and "to", allowing you to easily reverse the animation.

Selected/current animation - described here.

Custom - converts the current animation settings into a script-like form and lets you edit them. The available settings depend on the selected animation type.

Animation settings field - depends on the selected animation type.

Advanced - lets you use an advanced animation.

Hotkeys

• Ctrl+Enter - saves the animation settings and closes the window.
• The hotkeys for the advanced animation list can be found here.

Simulate

Right-click an animation cell in the Action matrix or in the Properties window to play it on the Designer canvas without compiling or exporting the project:

• Simulate - plays the animation at its normal speed.
• Simulate 1/10 speed - plays it in slow motion, useful to check the details of the animation.

The menu the animation belongs to must already be open in the Designer, and the cell must actually hold an animation - otherwise the commands are unavailable or tell you so. Custom animations and the "Hide menu" type are not simulated; for an advanced animation, only the steps that can be simulated are played, the rest are skipped.

Press Esc to stop a running simulation.