Mouse action animations

When a mouse button is pressed during recording, BB FlashBack can show an animation in the final movie, to indicate the action that occurred. These animations can be customised by editing the bitmaps used to create them.

How to switch mouse action animations on and off:

In Player, select or deselect the menu item "Highlight mouse clicks" under the View menu to turn the animations on or off.

How to use the default animations instead of customised animations saved in a movie file:

If you play back an FBR file with customised mouse animations but want to use the default animations or your own customised images, select the Reset mouse action images item from the Edit menu in BB FlashBack Player.

How to customise mouse action animations:

The images used in animations are contained in the "custom" folder, which is in the BB FlashBack install folder. When Player starts, it loads these images. Take a look in this folder and you will see a number of .PNG image files called LeftMouseDblClk1.png, LeftMouseDown1.png etc.

When a mouse action occurs in the movie, BB FlashBack overlays these images onto the mouse cursor in a sequence to create the animation. For example, if the right mouse button was pushed down, it would overlay RightMouseDown1.png, then RightMouseDown2.png, then RightMouseDown3.png to create the animation effect.

To change the animation seen for a mouse action, you simply need to change the image files used.

When you change the animations, your customised version is saved into the movie (FBR) file and also included in all exports you make.

For example: if you wanted to change the right mouse down animation, you could edit the 3 files called RightMouseDown1.png, RightMouseDown2.png and RightMouseDown3.png in an image editor application to create a completely different effect. Each of the images must be the same size.

Supported formats for the image files are: BMP, GIF, PNG, JPG, JPEG and ICO.

If you wanted to use BMP files instead of PNG files for the right mouse down animation, you would remove the RightMouseDown<frame number>.PNG files from the Custom folder and replace them with RightMouseDown<frame number>.BMP files.

The actions available for animation are:

• Left button down

• Left button up

• Left button double click

• Right button down

• Right button up

• Right button double click

• Middle button down

• Middle button up

• Middle button double click

• Scroll wheel up

• Scroll wheel down

No default animation is supplied for middle button actions.

Transparency

The animation images need transparency, or they would completely obscure the mouse pointer and the movie around it. BB FlashBack handles transparency in the images in one of two ways:

1. By treating one colour in the image as 'transparent'
   The transparent colour is set by the TransparentColour variable in the custom.cfg file - see the section More advanced customisation below. If you use normal BMP, GIF, JPG or 8 bit PNG images you must use this method and specify a colour as 'transparent'.

2. By using transparency information encoded into the image.
   This is only available for 32bit 'ARGB' BMP files and 24bit PNG format images. 24bit PNG images can be saved by Adobe Photoshop and other image processing applications.

More advanced customisation

In the custom folder is another file, custom.cfg which holds details on how Player will use the animation images. It is a text file and you can edit this to change the number of frames of animation, speed of animation and the transparent colour in the image files.

The file holds a number of numeric values which relate to the various mouse action animations. You can change these values to change the animation.

Here is a sample set of lines from custom.cfg which control the left button down animation. Comments on how you could change the value are on the right.