Scenarist activating more buttons!

[smpmusic]

Hi there,

I have got a question how I actually can add more interactivity onto a DVD in Scenarist.

What I want to do firstly is having 10 buttons, showing 10 scenes of a film. What I want is that the user first activates 3 or 4 buttons and then press a button, so these scenes play one after another.

Secondly I want to create something like a "Memory" game, 16 images, every image is covered let's say by a black square (which is a subpicture), what can I do that eg I can say Button1 is highlightes (which would mean I see the image below) and Button12 is highlighted,

I hope I described my problem properly,
thanks for your help,...

[SurfDrifter]

What you're asking here requires a perfect knowledge of command sequences and good manipulating of GPRMS...
Basically the number is huge(10 scenes), which i think would require 10x10=100 dublicate menus, but then again, i might be wrong...
You have to find a way to set for each selection a GMRM value and then to interpret these values as a series of scenes, which means that in every scenes end there would be to many commands to check various conditions, so as to make appropriate jumps...
I can't think of a good way for this now, but i'll think about it..

As for the memory game, one good start is to create dublicate menus, but with DIFFERENT subpicture each time, so as the highlights would change...Basically, it would require all the possible combinations...
Once, for a project of linking a location with one of 8 pictures(random ones) i had to create 64 dublicate menus, with each button having about 20 lines of code...
Can't explain it of course here!!

[mpucoder]

One way would be to use a gprm as a bitmask, each bit representing a scene. For the menu you start by clearing all the bits in the gprm, here I'll use gprm1.

mov gprm1, 0

For each button to select a scene the button command sets the appropriate bit

or gprm1, 1 ; button 1 command, sets bit for scene 1
or gprm1, 2 ; button 2 command, sets bit for scene 2
or gprm1, 4 ; button 3 command, sets bit for scene 3
and so on.

Now, in the PGC for the movie you need a section of commands to test the bits. They will need to appear in the precommand area to chose the first scene, and all but the first command needs to be repeated in the cell command area.
if (gprm1 BC 1) LinkCN (cell number for first scene)
if (gprm1 BC 2) LinkCN (cell number for scene 2)
if (gprm1 BC 4) LinkCN (cell number for scene 3)
and so on

Now at the end of each scene set the cell command number to the cell command to test for the following scene. ie after scene 1 you want to start testing for scene 2 and on, after scene 2 you want to test for scene 3 and on.

[smpmusic]

Ok I understand the idea of theoretically doing it, as I had this idea before,...

-I press button 3 and the value is saved in GPRM 0, then button 1 (saved in GPRM 1) then button 5 (saved in GPRM 2), you get the idea, at the end when I press play I can read out the information from the GPRMs and play the PGC, no problem there, but what I want to do is give the user kind of a feedback, so when he presses button one, he know's that button 1 is pressed, therefore on one screen buttons 3, 1 and five will be highlighted ... is this possible

-Second thing,...can I give the user actually dynamic data eg in a subtitle so eg when I press button 1 a subtitle comes up and says your playback queue is Track 1 and after that when I press button 3, "Your playback queue is Track 1 and Track 3", what I mean is if I can update subtitle streams or if there is something dynamic I can update to let the user know what he is doing

Hope that's not too complicated, if you need more info let me know,...
thanks for you help

[mpucoder]

The problem with that is, as SurfDrifter said, DVDs can not create graphics, they must all be on the disk. You also cannot highlight more than one button.
It's just a little messy with ten buttons and different graphic/video for every combination - that's only 2^10, or 1024 different menues.
The queue list, on the other hand, would require 10! (10 factorial) or 3628800 different subpictures.

DVDs weren't really made for computer-like interactivity. A simple game of tic-tac-toe requires 3^9 (19683) different graphics.