Cursor Shapes

[jojolina]

Hi All

30 degrees C, no wind and the sea is smiling, gotta love South Africa. Anyhoo, as Yoda is fond of saying, I have another insane client who requires that anyone using the training sim that I am building does not see a mouse, but wants the corporate logo as the cursor (a parrot, so the shape is conducive to pointing). I have the image, but can someone PLEASE help me and let me know how to do this, if at all possible??

Thanks a stack in advance.

Andrew

[Captiv8r]

Hi Andrew

Greetings from Portland, Oregon, where things are soggy and cold. Ah, well. At least it's nice inside the hotel where the WritersUA conference is occurring and I just get to be an Adobe booth bunny.

Long time no see. Nice seeing you around.

Have you tried creating such an image as an available .CUR file such as you might find here.

I'm thinking that as long as you can coax it to exist in that file type, you might be able to choose it as the cursor for Captivate.

Cheers... Rick

[AMAC5TH]

Andrew,

Ricks right. You can create a custom cursor by using certain programs that automate the process of turning an image into a cursor file (.CUR). A program I have used successfully is called Cursor Maker and can be found: http://www.rw-designer.com/cursor-maker here">here

It will even allow you to specify which parts of the cursor do the pointing, if that makes sense. I think it would be perfect for your needs. Be warned though, my experience with Captivate and custom cursors is that once you have created it properly and try to use it, Captivate places a rather annoying illuminous green border round it for some reason. Very strange because it works when you use the custom cursor as the default for windows ... I think this has been documented in the forums already ,,,

On a last note, after creating your cursor, a simple way to use it in Captivate is just to copy the actual file from wherever its saved, double click on the mouse in a project, choose browse and then just paste it in. The default cursor directory in Captivate is the Windows one, i.e. c:\Windows\Cursors

Hope this helps also,

Cheers,
Alex.

[jojolina]

HI All

Big thanks to Rick and Alex. Great help guys!!

Andrew

[jojolina]

Hi All (once again)

The solutions given are great in demonstration mode, but it seems that with a training sim, the individual computer settings is the override. To try and make sense, I have built the cursor with its hotspot (clickpoint, whatever) and it works a treat. In demonstration mode the custom cursor works like a charm, but as soon as the user opens up the training sim where they need to interact with the machine, then the standard windows arrow shows and it is here that the client wants the custom cursor. In other words, it should not matter who accesses the program or what the mouse settings are on that machine. As soon as the user's mouse moves onto the Captivate project, it should change to the custom shape.

Is possible, no????

Andrew

[Captiv8r]

Hi Andrew

Unfortunately, I don't believe it's going to be any easy task to do this. Keep in mind that the cursor you are seeing in Captivate is simply an image. It's not a real cursor. Just an image that is following a path similar to what was recorded.

In Simulations, you are using the live Windows cursor file, so whatever the user has set for Windows will precede. However, having said that, I do believe that applications such as Comet Cursor are Flash based. So it seems reasonable to me that if this is the case, it's really only a matter of time until some bright soul will design a "cursor changing widget" that we could drop into Captivate movies to accomplish the same thing.

Cheers... Rick

[jojolina]

Here's praying my wise and learned friend. Hopefully Paul Dewhurst reads this and is tickled sufficiently or mayhap some other guru of the widget factory.

Andrew