|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
This page describes an overall process for the mechanics of developing your simulation. It may be handy to print this page out and use it as a guide when you are developing your simulations.
Important: We recommend that you practice first with adding effects and transitions, such as what is described in the CS Effects Quick Start page and the CS Transition Quick Start page before getting into defining states. The process described in this section is useful when you need to create more elaborate scenarios, such as those spanning multiple locations and multiple fire conditions.
How Long Does it Take to Create a Scenario?: While you can make a simple scenario (a single location with few changing fire conditions) within an hour, we have found that scenarios of moderate complexity (6-8 locations, 3-5 states) can take 1 to 3 days to complete (counting everything: planning, photography, production, testing, etc.). In spite of their claims, this time is comparable to scenario creation with supposed "simpler" systems.
Step 1. Planning the training objectives. Scenarios can take a few hours or several weeks to produce. If you have not clearly identified what you want to accomplish with the scenario (training objectives) you are making and how you will measure its success, you can never know if the effort you will make is worth the time invested. If you want to make a quick-and-dirty mock-up, you don't need much planning, but think realistically about what you need to accomplish given the amount of time you want to spend. You can always come back and add more if you find what you have produced needs to be extended.
Step 2. Listing the different locations. How many locations (perspectives) do you want to give to your audience? In producing a multi-location scenario, think about what are the meaningfully different locations. You can certainly take pictures 10-15 feet from one another, but you will end up with a lot of work and most shots will not be meaningfully-different from other shots. Think about which location and angles get you the most coverage for the aspects of the simulation you are making. If you find that you want a wide-angle shot, you can use our panorama component to let the user scroll across the scene.
Step 3. Listing the different states. A "state" is a description of a possible configuration of smoke and fire for a given scenario. For example, you may have a "no smoke" state, a "wispy smoke" state, an "incipient" state, and a "fully-involved" state, or anywhere in between. For a house fire, you might have different states for how the fire has progressed from one section of the house to another. Think hard about how many different fire conditions ("states") you need to show, since you will need to produce visuals for each state. As in Step 2, think about the meaningfully-different states, not all possible variations at minute detail.
Step 4. Create a simulation opening screen. If your simulation has more than one location and more than one state, you'll want to create an opening screen that sets the state to its starting value. Your opening screen might give information about the scenario, or might be a picture from your apparatus as the student is approaching the scene. You will drop a CS State Manager token into this screen, set the starting state number, and indicate in the interface RESET TO STATE. See the section on CS State Manager about how to do this.
Step 5. Start with the first location. Create a new Flash file and load (import) the background picture.
Step 6. Create the states for this location. If you only have one location, you do not need to make different states using CS State Manager -- you can accomplish what you need using the CS Transition tool. If you do have multiple locations, drag-and-drop a CS State Manager token into your file, one for each state of your simulation. Select each instance and, through its interface (Window > Component Inspector), set its state number, how you will trigger the state, specific keystroke, etc.
What you will do in the next steps is to place the smoke and fire (CS Effects, or Fire Clips, or any other movie clip), and tell each smoke and fire generator how to transition (CS Transition) among the different states you've created.
Tip: It is a good idea to place these tokens on a new layer so you can find them quickly if you lose track of where you have placed them.
Step 7. Place the smoke, fire, and other effects/animations in the first location. Drop into the scene whatever smoke and fire effects you want. For each effect you want to control via a transition, make sure to give it a unique instance name. You set the instance name by selecting the effect, opening the Properties panel, and entering the name (no spaces or puctuation) into the box labeled "<Instance Name>". This gives the effect a name you can refer to when you tell it how to transition among the different fire conditions.
Tip: It is a good idea to place these tokens each on their own layer, and name the layer, so you can selectively show or hide them.
Step 8. Create the effect transitions for each states. This is the tricky part. You need to lay out which effects change on which state changes. If you think about the states you articulated in Step 3, you can group the changes that need to be made by state. For each state, create a transition by dropping a CS Transition token on the Stage and specify which effect instance it addresses (a single transition can specify multiple targets by separating the effect instance name by a comma, as in "smoke1, smoke2, smoke3" (no double quotation marks), etc. Since each transition addresses one or more effects, you might have more than one transition for a state. For example, in early stages of the fire, you may want to hide the smoke conditions in some extension of the building. Therefore, you will need a transition that HIDES the smoke effect for that state. Please see the CS Transition section of this manual for information about different types of transitions.
For each of the transitions, we suggest making them trigger on a keystroke while you are testing your first location.
Step 9. Test the location for each state. Iterate by adding new transitions, testing, and seeing if the results are what you are trying to accomplish.
Step 10. Add navigation to the location, if desired. Before you add navigation to the Flash movie, you will need to decide how you will distribute the files.
Step 11. Create the next location, if you have one. If you are making multiple locations, you can create a new Flash file and bring in the next picture, then copy and paste all the transitions, states, effects, and movie clips from the first movie directly into the second (and subsequent) movies. Alternatively, just use File > Save As... in your first movie to save it as your new location, then swap out the background image and adjust the effects, clips, masks, etc. for the new position.
Step 12. Repeat steps 7-11 as necessary.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|