Event Reference List

Select the event you wish to recieve help on:

 

These events are associated with the computer's mouse;
There are three main categories of mouse events; they determine the scope of your event:

Relates to the entire presentation.
Relates only to the current scene.
Relates only to the selected actor.

When a mouse event is selected you will notice a new pull down menu is visible. This allows you to specify exactly which mouse capability you wish to be used. Liquid Media can detect eleven different things you can do with your mouse.

• Left Down: when the Left mouse button is pressed.
• Right Down: when the right mouse button is pressed.
• Middle Down: when the Middle mouse button is pressed.
• Left Up: when the Left mouse button is released
• Right Up: when the right mouse button is released
• Middle Up: When the middle mouse button is released
• Wheel Down: When the mouse wheel turns towards you
• Wheel Up: When the mouse wheel turns away from you
• Enter: Every time the mouse pointer moves onto a presentation, scene or actor.
• Exit: Every time the mouse pointer leaves the region of the presentation, scene or actor.
• Move: Every time the mouse pointer moves, while it is over a presentation, scene or actor.

These events are started when you press a key, each key on the keyboard can be assigned its own actions. There are three main categories of key events:

Actions placed on this event relate to the entire presentation. So for example if you might wanted the 'enter' key to move to the next scene, defining this action under the presentation:key would make it effect the whole presentation, so you wont have to re-create the action for every scene. However, this option will only allow you to change the presentation environment (such as variables, triggers, scene navigation), actors cannot be affected.

Actions that you set up under this option relate only to the current scene. This would be useful for customizing each scene. An example would be having an effect placed on the background image when the space bar key is pressed, using scene:key would allow you to have a different effect for each scene.

Each key on your keyboard can only have one set if actions applied to it, so if the "enter" key was given an action in presentation, scene and actor which one would work? scene:key will override presentation:key, and actor:key will override both. However for actor:key actions to be working, the actor needs to be visible (not hidden). Also, if more than one actor has actions set for the same key then the actor that was created first will work and the other will not.

When you select a key event you will notice that a new pull down menu appears, this allows you to specify the key you wish to use to start your action off.

These events represent the point in time where the scene or actor is created by liquidmedia.

Scene Birth occurs each time the current scene is loaded, it is often useful for starting background music or variables.

This event occurs right before the selected actor is first created. This is useful in many situations, for example, if you have an image with a path but you don't want the path to play automatically, then you might place a "path:pause" action in the actor's birth event. Another use of this event could be hiding an actor because you wish it to appear later in your presentation.

These events represent the point in time where the scene or actor is destroyed by liquidmedia.

To illustrate the functionality of this event, you could add a command "Scene:Restart", this would result in the scene being placed into an everlasting loop because every time it finishes, it would be restarted again. Death events are often useful for setting variables.

Actors are usually destroyed at the end of each scene, which means you could do the same test and place "Scene:Restart" in an actor death to create another everlasting loop. Exceptions to this are 'persistent actors' (when an actor that stays visible over a number of scenes).

Liquid media is revolutionary; it lets you insert dynamic media into your presentation such as movie clips and sound. Media actors have a unique event that is started when the media is finished playing. This event allows you to maintain flow in your presentation. For example you can play an introduction movie clip or company animation, at the end you could automatically make it fade out (or some other spectacular effect) and continue with the detailed content of your presentation. The media pull down menu is illustrated below.

Triggers are special because they are started (or fired) by other actions. Triggers only effect the scene they are created in, if you move to another scene they will no longer apply and have to be re-created. You can have up to 1000 independent triggers for each scene. What are they useful for you ask? ...

... When you find yourself adding the same actions over and over again to different actors, its time to start using triggers. Take the things you are repeating and place them into a scene:trigger. By doing this you create ONE instance of the actions, whereas before you had MANY instances. Now every event that needs to use those actions only has to "fire" (or start) the trigger. Another benefit is that when you need to make changes, you only need to edit the trigger, rather than going through and editing all the actors individually. To learn more about how to 'fire' (or start) a trigger, click here

Each trigger has a number which can be specified using this data entry box -

If you know about paths already then you will pick this up really easily (if you need help with paths click here). When a path plays, it moves from point to point until it reaches the end point, where it stops. Every point along a path is a special event and can have its own actions. This is a powerful feature, from simple things like moving to the next scene automatically when a path ends, to making paths loop, to smoothly animated fold-out menus like the windows start bar.

This is the extra options box that will appear when you select the point event. This is where you specify the 'point number' along the actor's path. When selecting the points along the path, the actor will jump to the point that you are currently editing so you can be clear on what you are editing.

This event occurs when the text within a text actor is dynamically changed. When the 'EditText' command is used the actor's 'textchanged' event will be executed. This is useful for processing any text data that is entered during real-time. For example, a number is entered into a text actor in real-time using the 'EditText' command and stored in a variable, the 'textchanged' event would then be triggered and could process the number and test it against certain rules then output a different result based on the value of the entered number.

This event allows actors to react when they come in contact with another actor. The collision event is executed at the exact point in time where it hits another pre-defined actor. For example if you had a landscape scene with water droplets moving on paths down to the bottom of the screen to simulate rain; when each droplet hits a transparent box at the bottom of the scene a rain splashing sound effect is played. This same effect could be achieved by adding a sound effect to the end point of every droplet actor but you can clearly see how this technique is more efficient because you only need to define the effect once. You could make a more realistic rain effect by adding in variables to each droplet and a different sound is played on collision depending on what variable the droplet has defined in it.