Customizing a sprite's cursor
March 27, 2001
by Will Turnage
Dear Multimedia Handyman,
Is there a list anywhere of what the values are for cursors?
Sam Birch
Dear Sam,
If you want to change the cursor in your project, there are two ways that Lingo lets you do this. The first way uses the Lingo command cursor followed by an integer representing the number for the cursor, such as:
cursor 2
When you call the cursor command directly, it changes the cursor's appearance throughout your movie. While this makes sense in certain situations, such as displaying the watch/hourglass when loading a movie or just hiding the cursor altogether, in most cases you'll just want the cursor to change when you roll over a specific sprite in your movie. In this situation, instead of just calling the cursor command, you set the cursor of a specific sprite like this:
sprite(3).cursor = 2
This code will change the cursor of sprite 3 to the crosshair cursor. Once you've called this command, Director will always display the crosshair cursor when it's over sprite 3 no matter where you are in the Score, or which cast member is currently displayed in sprite 3. If you want to turn off the custom cursor for any sprite, then just set the sprite's cursor equal to zero, or
sprite(3).cursor = 0
If you've read Director's help regarding cursors, you'll see that it only lists 5 or 6 different cursor options. This is a bit misleading because, in fact there are 25 different options for cursors that are built in to Director. You can use anyone of these 25 cursors in your movie without needing extra artwork or Xtras. The 25 cursors and their corresponding integers are:
|
0 -1 1 2 3 4 200 254 256 257 258 259 260 272 280 281 284 285 286 290 291 292 301 302 303 |
No cursor set (Arrow) Arrow I-Beam Crosshair Crossbar Watch (or hourglass on Windows) Blank Help Pencil Eraser Select Bucket Hand Lasso Finger Dropper Vertical Size Horizontal Size Diagonal Size Closed Hand No Drop Hand Copy Closed Hand Airbrush Zoom In Zoom Out |
Luckily, you don't need to learn all 25 of these numbers if you want to assign custom cursors in your project. Below is the code for a simple behavior you can use that will assign a custom cursor to your sprite. Best of all, it displays a popup menu of the cursors' names instead of their numbers, making it very easy to use.
property pCursor
property pSavedCursor
on beginSprite me
pSavedCursor = sprite(me.spriteNum).cursor
sprite(me.spriteNum).cursor = pCursor
end
on endSprite me
sprite(me.spriteNum).cursor = pSavedCursor
end
on getPropertyDescriptionList
return [#pCursor: [#format: #cursor, #default: 0, #comment: "Select cursor:"]]
end
The key to this behavior is in the getPropertyDescriptionList handler. By setting the format of your pCursor property equal to #cursor, you tell Director to display a popup menu of all the different cursor types.
The rest of the behavior's code is pretty simple. When the behavior begins, it saves the cursor value currently assigned to the sprite into a variable. Then it changes the cursor of the sprite to the cursor you want. Finally, when the sprite ends, it sets the cursor of the sprite equal to its original value.
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