Classic Shell: Forum

Hi,

I tried to make an animated button and I am lost on the whole line of pixels thing. I rendered the images and put them in one png with a transparent background. However, I don't know how to create a line of pixels in Gimp. I attached the picture. The idea is the propeller would rotate clockwise. The tutorials I read talk about what the pixels mean etc... However, I haven't found anything that says how to add them.

Update;

I think I figured it out to some extent. I copied the pixels from an animated button from the forum and moved everything around. It is working now. One question though, it is spinning around really fast. How could I slow the rate of spinning down?

Update 2; I was able to create the button I wanted, it is below. The picture attached to this message was deleted to avoid confusion.

You need to add an extra line at the top of the image. That's where the pixels go.

Thanks Ivo,

I figured it out some as you were replying. I need to read more about what the pixels do. Right now I just copied some from a different button that was on the forum. Yes I see you need to add 1 pixel more than the sum of your images. In my case the images are 40x40 pixels. There are 12. So the width is 40 pixels and the height is (40x12)+1=481 pixels, for anyone learning. In Gimp if you change your grid to 1 x 1 pixels and show the grid then zoom in a lot so you can see each pixel. It's not too hard to do in Gimp.

Update; I ended up adding one more frame to the end. I just copied the start frame to the end to avoid jumping issues. So there are now 13 frames, bringing the height to (40x13)+1=521

Wow, so reading the help for this is giving me a headache. I just copied the color code stuff so I'm sure it's not right for the images i have. If anyone understands how to actually implement the pixels and wants to give it a shot, feel free. The idea is it just rotates around at a reasonable rate of speed.

Update; Ignore this post, I figured it out.

ok i got it all figured out. i think i found an error in the documentation though. it seems the frame ranges for the animated buttons are backwards. i flipped them and it then went through the frames in the correct order. this is for pixel 7 and 9. it says blue is the start and red is the end but this is opposite. you can see it in the rotation of the propeller. if you use the documentation the propeller rotates backwards (i.e. goes through the frames backwards).

update; disregard the bug I thought I found. it turned out my renderings were backwards from what i thought they were.

Thought this may help see the button better. Against a dark background, it looks great.

Nice work!!

_________________
Nothing is left unfinis.....

below is the latest version of the button.

update; this version has the leading edge turn blue when clicked. this adds an extra frame, bringing the height to (40x14)+1=561pixels

update 2; I removed the hub as it made the button look less interesting. I increased the resolution to 256x256. I changed the color scheme so that it will work with any windows color.

update 3; Changed the final color to black, so that it shows up on Windows 8.1 taskbar. Previously, I was using Windows 7 and the button worked with that OS. But on Windows 8.1 you couldn't see the final color.

thanks

I took the lessons learned making my new buttons, located here:

http://www.classicshell.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=4971

And applied them to the propeller button, which was my first. The update is above. The main improvements being, you can resize it and use it with any windows color. I removed the hub to make the button more visually interesting.