Slow Glass Animation System Cues

Just like a stage play, a cue is a trigger for something to happen on the stage. Cues are events that cause all the actions listed following the cue to happen. Cues at the “top level” of the script (within the MAIN scene) will be automatically enabled, those within scenes will only be active once the scene performance has started.

At present, cues have a maximum resolution of 1 second, however this might change to something smaller in the future.

The following types of cue are available.

Setup / init

This cue is active once only, actions following this cue will be executed when the scene is first loaded in memory. It can be used to load image and other resources and any other preparatory work. Note that for this to be most useful you need to use the prepare and act out commands, possibly setting scene variables between the two.

Within an active scene this cue will never be activated again once it has been run.

Begin

This cue will be active once, when the scene starts from the perform or act out actions and will not be activated again.

Typically start cues are used to place resources on the canvas, and possibly also making them visible depending on need.

After

after {number} {duration}

This cue is active once, at the given duration after the scene performane starts.

Every

every {number} {duration}

This cue is active at regular intervals, as given by the duration. It repeats every interval until the scene is ended.≈

At

at hh:mm

at hh:mm:ss

This cue activates once daily, at the specified time. If seconds are not given it will activate at 0 seconds into the minute.

Each

each hh:mm

each hh:mm:ss

This works similar to the at cue but allows for one or more of the digits in the time to be replaced be an asterisk (‘*’) character. This means “any value”, so for example:

each **:15:00 will cue at 15 minutes past each hour of the day (so 24 times per day). Be careful with your asterisks, the pattern:

each **:15:** will cue 24 * 60 times - once for each second during the 15th minute of each hour.

You can use multiple cues for the same actions, so for example:

each **:15
each **:30
each **:45
    play church-bells-quarter-hour
each **:00
    start church-bells $HOURS

How does each **:*0 differ from every 10 minutes? The former happens every tenth minute according to the clock time; the latter first happens 10 minutes after its scene is started, and every 10 minutes after that.

When

when {logic-expression}

At least once per second the logic expression is tested and the cue is activated if the expression evaluates to true. IMPORTANT - once the cue has been activated the condition will not be checked for at least one minute.

OnKey

(To be added)

AtEnd

This cue is activated when the current scene is stopped (either by an action in the scene itself or from “outside”). It allows you to do any clean up or final actions. (This cue will never be active for the top level scene as it cannot be stopped).

On Call

on call {routine-name}

This cue is activated by another action, call, with the same routine name. It acts rather like a procedure call in other languages and processing of the “calling” actions is suspended until the called routine completes. For further disucssion see the call action in the Flow Control page.