Selectable standard rez or high rez in same pano

[cblane]

I often hear from people how much they like high resolution panoramas but then they complain about how "heavy" they are. Does anyone here have a good solution for doing something like Vimeo does with videos using the HD button? - that is, defaulting to low rez but having a button for HD by choice. I would want this to be an element of the skin as opposed to a hotspot.

[Hopki]

Hi,
This is fairly easy to do but time consuming, however why not use multi resolution?
Regards,
Hopki

[smooth]

Before Multi-resolution I would produce two panoramas/.swf files one high resolution and the other standard resolution.
You add a "stacked" button from standard to high. I called mine SD/HD. Once clicked it would load the High resolution version and the button would than change to SD.
Obviously the two .swf files shared the one skin. With the SD version the skin holder.

Regards, Smooth

[cblane]

I don't think the multires quite fits what I'm looking for. If I understand it correctly, it's for when the user zooms in and wants expects to see more detail. In this case I'm thinking more of the case where the end user has low or high bandwidth so zoom would be a deciding factor. If I'm wrong about the multires option, I'll need some pointers to get me going for using it for this purpose.

What Smooth described sounds Like the kind of thing I'm after. Smooth, can you elaborate more on how to go about setting up a button to do this in the skin?

[smooth]

It is a case of two button (stacked on top of one another).
When one is in view the others are set to hidden (Hide Element).

Low res settings:

low_res.jpg (98.91 KiB) Viewed 4478 times

High res settings:

hi_res.jpg (104.49 KiB) Viewed 4478 times

Both buttons obviously have the exact same position settings in the skin.

You have two panoramas:
One called lo_res.swf the other called hi_res.swf

Only one skin (as per usual) and this is always on the starting panorama (in this case the lo_res.swf).
*These captures are of a very old skin of mine and some things may have change over the releases.

Regards, Smooth

[Hopki]

Hi,
Good point about band width, you could even mix this right up and have the multi-res as the high res and a low resolution swf for the low band width version.

OK, If your using multiple nodes and want to switch between the two SWF files you can add the high and low res file name in the user data.
The attached project has two nodes each with a low and high res version, well I say high res, more like low and lower but you should get the idea. The project opens with park_low.swf when you open the index.html page. The park_low.p2vr file also has the skin and HTML page.

You can use Smooths settings and have the two stacked buttons, just point the Open Next panorama URL to a place holder to access the file name. However this will also work with just one button as you only need a mouse click => open next panorama => url: $ui => target: $cur action to switch back and forth, but wont look as good.

In the attached example I have used $ui in the skin then in the low res pano user data info text field I put the file name for the high res version.
In the high res pano user data info text field I put the file name for the low res version.
This means each pano has a link to its lower or higher res counterpart so the button can be click at any time during the tour.

To enhance this further I am using the transition cross fade but have unselected all the Effects as I just want a nice fade between the two different resolutions.

Regards,
Hopki

[smooth]

Another tour program I use distinguishes between smaller window and fullscreen.
You could add the action to go fullscreen when opening the high resolution version. Simply add this to your Hi-Res button and exit fullscreen to the Lo-Res button.

Regards, Smooth

[cblane]

Thanks Smooth and Hopki. You've given me a lot to work with. I've gotten swamped in my day job so it may be a couple of weeks before I get to test this out.

One thought that occurred to me is that something that would be great from the user perspective (but perhaps not realistic technically to implement) would be to autodetect the user's current bandwidth and select the version accordingly.

[cblane]

I finally had a chance to take a good look at this (the last 2 months have been a bit hectic) and try Smooth's solution. I just used simple text buttons and it does what I am looking for. Here's a link to an example: http://360nagoya.com/360-at-higashiyama-koen-zoo/.
When I find more time I'll have to dig into Hopki's suggestions more.

Thanks for the great help!