Andra
10th January 2005, 23:00
I know this is a long ass story, but please bare with me...
Hi there,
I'm building a DVD with 19 Music Videos. I wanted to add a menu to select a particular video, kind of like a chapter selection menu.
I wanted to use stills from the videos as buttons, but I didn't want to make them look like stamps. So I thought it would be cool to have a menu of 5 by 4 stills (one grey one at the bottom), but only show the top 3 by 3 in the title safe area of the menu. When you select a still that is actually outside the safe area, you hit a auto-activated button that moves the menu one still to the left or upwards. So to the user it looks he/she's navigating one big menu, while in fact there are 6 (or actually 14, but that's a different story).
I've built it like this, and it looks pretty cool.
But there's a catch (and I was hoping you could help me with it):
To uphold the illusion that it's all one big menu they're navigating, I have 9 normal buttons in the title safe area and 6 or 9 (depending on what menu we're looking at) auto-activated buttons outside of the safe area. The 9 normal buttons jump to a certain music-video and plays them. The buttons on the side have a Highlight Button and link command on them. Those make sure that the menu moves one still AND that the still that you selected, is selected again after it has moved into the safe area.
The problem is that the DVD first changes the highlight button, and only THEN links to the other menu. If it highlights another auto activated button it executes it's command instead of the link.
Now I'm stuck with 3 button infinately highlighting each other.
First of all, I would like to know wether it is possible to change the order of execution. So first link to the other menu, THEN change highlight button number. Force Selected Button isn't an option, because the same menu it aproached from three different buttons, with three different highlighted stills to target.
If that's not possible, then I thought of two possible ways to work around these problems. But as far as I can see, that would mean completely rebuilding 14 menu's times 15 to 18 buttons.
I'll try and explain myself:
I made the buttons from left to right and from top to bottom. So, they are numbered the same way. If I could change the button numbers, so that the ones inside the safe area are 1 to 9 and the ones outside the safe area are 10 to 15 (or 18), then the auto-activated buttons could never highlight another auto-activated button.
But I can't find a way to re-number the buttons. I tried double-clicking the button-names but when I change them and press Enter they simply change back.
Any ideas?
The second way to do it is very inefficient: adding 18 buttons to the even numbered menu's (so 2, 4 and 6 out of six menu's), and make the first 18 buttons invissible and un-selectable.
This way you could never highlight a button that is auto-activated.
In fact this solution has the same problem as the first one. That is, I can't change the order of buttons. The buttons I add wil be numbered 19 to 36, but I need them to be 1 to 18.
I hope someone has a suggestion!
Thanks for your time and thoughts.
Yours,
Andra
Hi there,
I'm building a DVD with 19 Music Videos. I wanted to add a menu to select a particular video, kind of like a chapter selection menu.
I wanted to use stills from the videos as buttons, but I didn't want to make them look like stamps. So I thought it would be cool to have a menu of 5 by 4 stills (one grey one at the bottom), but only show the top 3 by 3 in the title safe area of the menu. When you select a still that is actually outside the safe area, you hit a auto-activated button that moves the menu one still to the left or upwards. So to the user it looks he/she's navigating one big menu, while in fact there are 6 (or actually 14, but that's a different story).
I've built it like this, and it looks pretty cool.
But there's a catch (and I was hoping you could help me with it):
To uphold the illusion that it's all one big menu they're navigating, I have 9 normal buttons in the title safe area and 6 or 9 (depending on what menu we're looking at) auto-activated buttons outside of the safe area. The 9 normal buttons jump to a certain music-video and plays them. The buttons on the side have a Highlight Button and link command on them. Those make sure that the menu moves one still AND that the still that you selected, is selected again after it has moved into the safe area.
The problem is that the DVD first changes the highlight button, and only THEN links to the other menu. If it highlights another auto activated button it executes it's command instead of the link.
Now I'm stuck with 3 button infinately highlighting each other.
First of all, I would like to know wether it is possible to change the order of execution. So first link to the other menu, THEN change highlight button number. Force Selected Button isn't an option, because the same menu it aproached from three different buttons, with three different highlighted stills to target.
If that's not possible, then I thought of two possible ways to work around these problems. But as far as I can see, that would mean completely rebuilding 14 menu's times 15 to 18 buttons.
I'll try and explain myself:
I made the buttons from left to right and from top to bottom. So, they are numbered the same way. If I could change the button numbers, so that the ones inside the safe area are 1 to 9 and the ones outside the safe area are 10 to 15 (or 18), then the auto-activated buttons could never highlight another auto-activated button.
But I can't find a way to re-number the buttons. I tried double-clicking the button-names but when I change them and press Enter they simply change back.
Any ideas?
The second way to do it is very inefficient: adding 18 buttons to the even numbered menu's (so 2, 4 and 6 out of six menu's), and make the first 18 buttons invissible and un-selectable.
This way you could never highlight a button that is auto-activated.
In fact this solution has the same problem as the first one. That is, I can't change the order of buttons. The buttons I add wil be numbered 19 to 36, but I need them to be 1 to 18.
I hope someone has a suggestion!
Thanks for your time and thoughts.
Yours,
Andra