Thanks for that Boni

This post shows how to create a menu, use custom fonts, some new triggers types and the functionality of the HUD object.

1. Custom fonts

Several default font type comes with the program which are those that you will find in Windows by default. However these are not all that exciting when creating stories. So I added the ability to add custom fonts to the program which is done in 2 steps.

1. Find a font that will suit the project and install it in Windows by dropping it into the fonts folder.
2. Open the Custom fonts file and add the font name and the path to the list.

After that the font will be available for all future project and can be selected in the font list.

1. Creating a menu and new trigger types

In this case the menu is build using text objects, but it could also have be done using images. Three new types of triggers have been added to the program. A "Save" trigger which will let the viewer save there progress as they watch, play or read the story at a later time. A load trigger which will load the progress and an exit program trigger. These are simply added to the program as any other trigger and have no special options, so they only require to be linked to something that can activate them, such as a Click trigger.

An update to the Go to page trigger have been added, so its now possible to tell it to always return to the last page from which it came. This is useful for situations like menus, character sheets and in general for pages where content need to be reused. When activated the icon change to red, since im using it for a menu i tell it to also create a link to page 2, which will in case that there are no last page, such as when the story have just been started, that it will use this page instead of the last page.

1. HUD objects

In this example i have created a page of what a comic book could look like, all the gray box should of course be replaced with actually images. But in this case it shows an example of how its possible to design the layout before rendering the actually content, so the correct sizes of the images can be decided. As the comic might contain lots of pages. It would be annoying to have to flip through all the pages every time I wanted to get to the menu or if some character sheet was used. So to make this task easy, the HUD object can be used to quickly setup some default controls and will make it so any objects linked to it will appear as if they are part of a HUD and will by default be added to all pages in the project. The HUD tool menu allows for pages to be excluded, so in this example I exclude page 1 since that is where i made my menu and i don't want it to appear there. The menu also allow it to be used as if it was a button, this is done by simply turning on "clickable" and to make it work I hook it up to a Go to page trigger and tell it to go to page 1 where my menu is, so now regardless of what page im on i will always be able to go to the menu.

This post focus on image counter and how to use them with triggers to create a simple combat system.

Image counter

These have two purposes which are shared with text objects. These being able to present values in a graphical way when used with a Timer trigger or in this example as a progress bar to keep track of health for the player and an enemy.

1. Adding image counter

When added it will be represented by an empty place holder. Some standard editing tools are available to easily adjust the counter. 

2. Loading counter

Clicking the load images button will let you select an image from your computer. All images in the folder of the select image will automatically be loaded into the counter and can consist of 50 frames.

3. Creating combat system using variables

For the combat system to save progress after the fight and to be able to update it as the fight unfold. A series of variables will keep track of the health of the player and the enemy.

4. Link variables to image counters

To setup a working image counter and make it work as a progress bar. The checkbox "Use as progress bar" is selected. This will open the progress bar settings menu, which will allow you to tell what should control it. In this case i have selected the Player image counter and told it that as Maximum value it should use the variable "Player Maximum health" and for progress "Player Current health", same is done for the enemy image counter.

5. Setting up attack options

Empty image placeholders will be used to give the player options of where they would like to attack. In this case three have been added and there opacity lowered so its easier to see the image below. Image holders that haven't gotten an image loaded will automatically be invisible in the player. 

6. Load custom cursor

To make each of the attack option work an Click trigger is added. In this example its just for the head, but would require the same setup for each option. To make the attack system more visual, a custom cursor is loaded and will be used whenever the cursor is over the object which the "Click" trigger is linked to. In this case the image covering the enemies head. A small gray box next to the loaded cursor allows to test how the cursor will appear in the Interactive player. 

7. Setting up combat system

To make the combat more interesting a variable called "Player Attack Rating" is created and an attribute trigger is linked to the click trigger and setup to test whenever the enemies head is clicked, that the value of the variable is Greater than or equal a random roll of 100. To make the combat even more interesting a system that would reduce the chance of hitting the head but cause more damage could be made, making it up to the player to decide whether damage is more important than accuracy.

8. Damage system

To give the enemy damage another attribute trigger with a "Set" value is linked to the "Test" trigger. Since a "Test" trigger will only activate what is linked to it if the performed test is true, damage to the enemy will only happen as long as "Player Attack Rating" is greater than or equal to the random roll. In that case 1 will be subtracted from "Enemy Current health". To see what it would look like in the player you can use the preview button in the navigation window.

9. Preview project

As the enemy head is clicked and the test for hitting is successful its health bar will go down. Since this is just an example I haven't added anything to allow the enemy to hit the player or what will happen when someones health reaches 0.

Hi, Some time ago i presented a program that I was working on called Interactive media center, but it was still in early stages, so weren't able to really show a lot of it. But now that its starting to enter the final stages i thought i would present it in a bit more details.

This looks very nice!

Could you put together a video showing a basic overview of what it does? Even a "beta" video, with the admission that the product wasn't yet complete, would be awesome.

I plan on making a video at some point and probably a demo as well. But I keep adding stuff and making a video takes time which i can spend adding things :D, so i have to prioritize, so adding things at the moment seems best to me. But will add some screenshots, so at least an idea of what can be done is possible and then make the video later on.

Some features seem very reminiscent of MotionArtist by SmithMicro, which I've considered acquiring on numerous occasions (but haven't yet).

However, I don't believe MotionArtist has the ability to track variables, create your own "stats", and do decisions based on those. This looks really cool to me 3D-Mobster.

Does it only "export" to one format when you finalize the project?

And when can I get my hands on it? :D 

Yeah think you are right in regards to Motion artist, I have only tried a demo of it so can't say for sure. But you can also animate in there program, that is limitation in mine, because to really make it cool, it would need to be 3D but then I need an engine capable of that and its beyond me as one person, unfortunately :). And 2D animation using High quality renders like flash animation i don't think would be very useful or give very good end results, but works fine if its simple graphic, but think you would end up having lighting issues and very stiff looking animations. However have thought about adding parallax as it can make some cool effects i think. If you are not sure what it looks like here is an example where it works quite well i think: Link: Nevermind the bulletsBut I do think my program stands out when it comes to the variables, because they allow you to create stories that can force or put the viewer in surprising situations, which of course makes it funnier i think as its harder to predict how things might turn out.

So my aim is to make it so you can make things thought of like:

Game of Thrones game

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfohvHENZFk

Life is strange

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AURVxvIZrmU

Which of course have 3D controls, but are very story driven games, where mine is probably less game and more story due to the lack of actually moving a character around :).

Regarding export, when the project is finalized you get a program that you run like you would any other exe file. Which is the Interactive player capable of reading the project files. So the final project is like you would run Poser or some other program and it will play you project.

 In case you're wondering what I mean, I mean, should the brokerages only allow vendors to work or sell a particular specialty in order to spread out the support for figure s a little more?

By that I mean like they only do props, or morph's or textures. Specialty areas. 

I think it would be some what difficult or even counter productive to do something like that. I think most vendors make things that they them self find inspiring, but also being able to sell it plays a part. But if a vendor is stuck at just making for some models or areas, and then suddenly gets a good idea for something they would like to make and then can't do it, it would be bad for them and the customers, but also Renderosity because it might be a good product. But i understand what you mean, but think that a more suited way to solve it would be a collaboration between Renderosity and the vendors, in the sense that. If they would like more male or fantasy content for instant. They could encourage that through increasing the split % for the vendors on those type of products. So they could start by making a poll to see what type of content people are most interested in and then based on that maybe for 6 month or a year increase the split for vendors on such content. Whether that would work or not, i don't know.

Ah so, it is a type of Visual Novel Game, but fully video animated.  

You can make visual novel games in it as in the examples. But you can also use it to create comic books or combine videos and images into a single story. Personally i enjoy creating stories/comics and would normally use PS or Gimp to setup things. But i found that to be rather slow because they are not really designed for something like that, so tried to see if there was a program out there which could do what i wanted, but weren't able to find such. So it all started as something just for my own needs, but since there are a lot of people out there that uses Poser/Daz3D to make graphics. I thought, that im probably not the only one that would think it could be fun to create stories with there content. And always enjoying a good story, it have always annoyed me a little bit that you couldn't play a part in it. So making it possible to also add interaction to them was just the next step, and then it just kind of went a bit overboard with videos, audio and the ability to turn stories more into games. So its not solely designed to make games, it can also just be used for create stories, creating lightboxes etc.

this looks awesome

Thanks for that

Battling it out now with the bank for a small  personal loan for the printer. How the hell I have to do that is beyond me - the numbers are there, good scores, yet they're being idiots about approval because of "history" how are we supposed to get more history if banks don't give it to us? Don't get it.....

You win big bucks in the lottery and they will swarm you like flies :D

Oh, and remember those nasty headaches I got?

Not that i remember, or even knew, but congratulations none the less :), 5 years is a long time with headaches.

Regarding the 3d prints, i don't think there would be any problems in doing that, at least i cant see how that should violate anything as you are not sharing any of there digital models, which are what you agreed to when buying poser. I wouldn't even think you were violating anything should you decide to sell the 3d printed models. But anyway, that is at least what i found to be most logic, but maybe someone else know a bit more about it. 

I dont like waiting for html pages to load either....so avoiding html would be fine with me.

But what format is it delivered in, finally? And where would you display it? Would the end product be seen on a webpage (perhaps embedded?), or playable only on game players like the xbox? If you made one of these stories, where would people see it?

This sounds like an ambitious and intriguing project!

Everything is stored in a project folder in several files which stores all the information that is needed to run the project. The idea is as you finalize your project in the editor a copy of the player is stored together with the project and linked to it. So you can .zip the project folder and share that file and another person can then unzip it and simply run the player as you would any other file and that will execute the project. So you could share the project zip file on a webpage but people would have to download it and then run it from there computer.

You could compare it a bit to something like "Life is Strange" if you know that game which is a more cinematic/story driven type of game, but with my program there is less focus on being a game, since you can't directly control your character, so the focus is on telling a story through interactive means using high resolution graphics.

Life is strange trailer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AURVxvIZrmU

Unity3D - http://unity3d.com/

Unreal engine 4 - https://www.unrealengine.com/what-is-unreal-engine-4 

However i think poser characters in general have to many polygons to work very well for something like this and none of them are easy to use and might require you to be able to program as well, depending on what you want to make.

Cool idea ! One useful feature I can think of would be some kind of flowcharting functions so you can organize your story flow with perhaps optional conversion from the flowchart to a basic layout. Then the user could add stuff to the layout like images and audio, edit the hotspots the way they want and so on.

There is a built in navigation tool that keep track of all pages and how they are linked together.

The way you can look at the program UI wise, is that you have a work area, which is just your whole screen and would be one page, and you can add whatever you want to this and move it around where you think it should be. This also include hotspots, which I call triggers, which could be an image for instant and you can move this where ever you want it to be and it would only interact there, for example if the viewer clicked it.

All objects (Videos, images, triggers, texts, progress bars and so forth) can be dragged around with the mouse.

So each time you add a new page you get a clean work area where you can built the next part of the story. 

So I could embed a video in a web page. A man, say, walking up to a wall that has two doors. The video stops? pauses? I click the left side of the video,say--and the left door opens, and the video continues with him going through it? And if I click the right side, the right door opens and the video continues with him going through that door? Or do we jump to another web page, a new video, the man going thru the left or right door?

In html I can already put text below a video, giving the option to go left or right--but only by jumping to a new html page which will have the appropriate video. Clicking the video itself--somehow putting layers/triggers over it--I've never tried, but it does sound interesting.

The project is not placed on a web page. Its played through a player capable of reading all the information that make up a story. But in theory I guess you could make it as web page, that loads a new page all the time. However i find it annoying to having to wait for movies, sounds, objects etc to load, so doing it offline will improve speed so it becomes more like a movie.

But you are correct the whole movie would be made up by small movies corresponding to what selections are made. So the example you use could be the case.

I don't think there would be any problem in doing it in html if you wanted. But since it started as a personal project and i commonly ran into problems keeping track of things. The editor have a built in functionality that will do this for you, so when working on a given scene/page, you will be able to see all the input pages that leads to it and at the same time you can see all the output pages that the one you are working on leads to. So it makes it fairly easy because you can use this overview to quickly navigate through the story etc as you built it.

Also there are no limitation of how you organize your things, so you can have video playing on top of other videos, images on top of video etc.

Hope that answers your questions.

"Are you saying there would be clickable areas in a movie itself? Like an mp4  video? Or is this jumping from web page to web page?"

The clickable area will not be in the movie itself. But you will be able to add triggers (That being text or images) on top of the movie and through these it would appear as if it was the case. So it works kinda like layers, so for instant if you had a hallway and you wanted the viewer to choose which way to go, you would add triggers to each direction and put these on top of your movie and the viewer would be able to click them. And based on what is chosen you can move the story along.

So you have different ways to do it, either make it kinda like a "point and click" game where you click something on the movie clip or you could show the options as text explaining each possibility beneath it or where ever you want it to be.  

1. Go North

2. Go West

3. Speak with Jacob

etc.