Solution to a menu problem

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Hopki
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Posts: 12999
Joined: Thu Jan 10, 2008 3:16 pm
Location: Layer de la Haye, Essex UK
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The problem:
A large tour that has three locations, each location has sub locations. A text menu is required to highlight the start pano of each location and must remain highlighted when visiting the sub locations, so the text menu only shows the three locations and not sub locations, with me so far?

Also to add to this the viewer must be able to enter the tour at any point and the menu must still show the correct location, further more this is a non Pro project, so using separate p2vr project files, phew, dont want much then :D
Luckily the skin editor can sort this problem out using node markers.

Example as in the project attached:
pano_01 = location One
pano_02, 03, 04 = location Two
pano_05 = location Three

Clicking Location One will go to pano_01
Clicking Location Two would go to pano_02
Clicking Location Three will go to pano_05.

However while at pano_02 you have hotspots to go to pano_03 and 04 but Location Two must still be highlighted.
The initial solution was to use hotspot proxy ID's linking each pano to the menu. Where this went wrong is if you have a location set in the hotspot editor then a different one in the skin but linked with hotspot proxy ID, then the Skin will dominate and the location set in the skin will be used.

The solution, use Node markers.
Tag each panorama with the location,
In the attached example each pano has been tagged like so:

pano_01 = loc01
pano_02, 03, 04 = loc02
pano_05 = loc03

The node markers, Marker 1 to 3 have the above tags in the relevant Tour Node/Tag box. Each also has a text box and then a rectangle with the ID Click.
The only reason for the rectangle "click" is, in Flash you can not use the hand cursor on a text box but can on a rectangle. This gives a visual indication to the viewer that the menu item is an active element and can be clicked.
There are two graphics to show active and inactive states, these can be found in the hide_elemets container.
The text box will be above the active and inactive images so always showing.

Each project has the same skin and its own HTML page. Because the skin is looking for Tags there is no need to have separate skins with the menu starting in different locations.
Open the attached project and output folder, you can now open each of the index_01 to 05 HTML pages and the menu will start in the correct place.

However I will say that if this was a Pano2VR Pro project, then this would have been FAR simpler and a lot quicker to do, but of course if your only doing the odd one or two large projects a year then all good.

Regards,
Hopki
Attachments
node_marker.zip
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