Using mouse cursor function with animations (.gif) files

[rbvance]

Hi Trevor,

I'm writing an experiment for kids. We want them to look at a picture with animals hiding behind things, then use the mouse to click on one of the animals and go to another screen. We made the pictures in Flash and saved them as .gifs. I can get them to run, but I can't seem to make the mouse click work. I tried running it with the picture as a .bmp and it worked. So, can I use the mouse cursor as a key press when presenting an animated (.gif) file?

Thanks,
Becky

[Trevor Newell]

I don't quite believe our current versions of DirectRT can play a .gif file unless the file is specified as being an animation. If the file is specified as being an animation, I'm not quite sure if the region specifications set to it will still work - I imagine that it shouldn't have a problem doing so though.

You may want to see if the following page helps - simply skim down to the section that discusses animation and movie files:
http://www.empirisoft.com/directrt/help/directrt_stim.htm

Just about any files that Windows Media Player can play, DirectRT can play through as well. Using a .GIF should be possible, as long as you specify a '_' character before the stimulus.

[jarvis24]

As Trevor mentioned, I'm not sure though that click regions will register if they are occurring within a movie or animation. The problem I think is that they are not technically part of the same screen--they are figuratively "above" the screen and thus prevent the click from being registered on the full DirectRT screen "behind". This may be resolved in v2010. Or it may only affect certain systems. Just thought I'd throw this in on the chance that anybody was encountering this odd situation. And I do know that v2010 will display gif (as well as jpg and other image formats) as images rather than having to display them as movie or animation files. Whether the animation will still occur when specifying the gif as an image is something I don't know yet.