
Motion Menus:

You can now select movies as page backgrounds.  They can loop or not by your preference in the Inspector window.  However, since Sprite tracks cannot have transparency (only sprites within tracks can), pages with movie backgrounds will have one sprite track per button (so as not to obscure the movie track behind).  You can make these tracks "invisible", so you can put them over moving scenes, (by not setting a main image) but if you do they cannot have rollover or clicked-on images (such images if set will simply be ignored when updating the movie).  Also these buttons will not have proper transparency.  The user will still be able to identify these invisible hot-spots because if there is an action for the button, the cursor will change to the pointing gloved hand as a rollover action.  If you have a movie running behind a sprite button, I recommend just leaving the sprite with no images at all, only actions.

Quick Sprite Mode:

There is a new menu item (in the new menu :) called Quick Sprite Mode.  Selecting this will make dragging in the editor create a new sprite selection-rect style, instead of dragging existing sprites.  Combined with the new right-click feature for setting sprite actions and action-target-values, this allows great speed.  but it's easy to forget you have this option activated and then you can't drag or resize existing sprites.

Wired Sprites Notes:

MetaHoot now supports all QuickTime-friendly image formats for sprite images.  Transparent images will be filled in with whatever QuickTime sees fit, but you can set one color of your image to be a transparency mask color.  I should hope to support normal transparency in images in the future but I have no reason to believe it will be technically possible.

I've started a simple Wizard which adds Scene selection and navigation sprites, hopefully track selection will follow.  But I will need default buttons for those I guess, and they will not be as easy as default navigation buttons.  There seems to be a bug where buttons created by the wizard will randomly not be created in the movie.  In my experience this can be fixed by having first gone to the frame (View Frame) of the main image of the button, stepping ahead a few frames, and reseting the image.  I don't know why this works (or why it doesn't work in the first place).  If the wizard finds PICT files in the folder containing the movie file, it will add them instead of setting movie frames.  The pict files should be named "bg.pct" for the background picture and "1.pct" etc for the main image and "1r.pct" for the rollover image and "1c.pct" for the clicked image (the second 2 are optional of course).

Thank you for all bug reports

Noah Sorscher
metahoot@3ivx.com