Control whether triggers are active?

[aronm15237262]

I'm working on a custom puppet that has a lot of keybaord triggers. Due to this, there's 9 triggers going to 2 graphics, and the triggers simply move the graphics around the screen to specific locations together. However, I need one of the graphics to seperate to a different set of images keyed to the same triggers (so I made a swap set) but the problem with this is while the swap set works just fine, the second graphic still moves around the screen regardless of the first graphic. Is there a way to press a key and temporarily disable trigger inputs for the second graphic, or for a set of triggers? I need the second graphic to stay still until the swap set is changed back.

[alank99101739]

It is a little tricky to follow, but sounds like you might need separate trigger keys so you can move one without the other. 

But if you explained a bit more about how trigger keys are causing movement, that could help. E.g. are the trigger keys playing a replay? If so, you can edit the movements in the recording afterwards. (You can split the movement recording - a transform? - and move the second part of the movement recording to later...) But a bit more detail about how you are achieving things like movement could help.

[aronm15237262]

Yeah, sorry, I know this is a tough one to explain. The problem I'm running into is I'm using every other key on the keyboard, so if I can't make this work, then I'll have to go through and remove other keys and make the 2 graphics 2 seperate triggers. (this is the current back-up plan if I can't get this working)

I'll try and just explain the situation, I'm making a puppet that's sitting at a desk and controlling a keyboard and mouse, corresponding with what I'm doing while I game. If I press an arrow key to run forward, the puppet will press the arrow key as well, and so on. I have 9 triggers that are controlling where the mouse is on the desk (corresponding to where the cursor is on screen) but if I type, let's say the "P" key, the puppet's right hand needs to leave the mouse and press the key onscreen. I have the keys that the right hand can press as a part of a swap set and using the same triggers, so right now if I were to type the word "POOL" my puppet's right hand would leave the mouse, press the P, O twice, and L, and then go into a default resting pose where it rests on the keyboard over those keys. When I move my mouse onscreen, the right hand will move back to the mouse and control it like before. The problem is since the mouse position uses the same triggers as my right hand's typing images, as I type "Pool" the mouse will move around freely without the puppet's hand on it.

I'm actually using another program to send my keypresses over to animator while it runs in the background, so when I move my cursor to an area onscreen, the program is sending a keypress to character animator, and CA is showing one of 9 pre-drawn images of a right hand moving a mouse. The two things are sharing trigger keys because, well, since I had to program an entire keyboard's worth of keys into triggers, I ran out of available keys, so the hope is that there's a way to tell the mouse layer to occasionally "no longer listen to triggers" until my program sends a keypress letting it know that the cursor is moving again and my right hand is back on the mouse.

[aronm15237262]

Ha, I thought I recognized your name! I actually just read your essay yesterday, the one on using midi in CA! I was attempting to free up space by changing out using keypresses for midi keys (giving me more triggers to work with) but there's no way to keep my programming work in my other program and change the output to midi signal like I'd hoped. Loved your findings though, super informative and gave me some ideas.

[alank99101739]

Funky!!!

Have you thought of using Unicode characters or Latin-1 characters somehow? I am wondering if the key stroke your mouse tracking program is sending can be like a Latin-1 character (A-umlaut etc).  You can type Unicode characters in via a normal keyboard using ALT or OPTION to define the binding in CH (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_input#In_Microsoft_Windows), but you would never do that playing a game. So it should not collide (I hope!).

CH might need it to be a visible character (control characters and function keys might not work for example), but CH supports Japanese, German, etc - so I assume it supports full Unicode... which means I am hoping you can bind to a key not on your US english (or whatever) keyboard, but is on other international keyboards.

[aronm15237262]

Aw man, I got so excited there for a second. That was a brilliant idea, but unless I'm doing it wrong it doesn't seem to accept anything other than A-Z and 0-9. Tried several different languages and types of letters and symbols, but no luck. I imagine I'd have to change the whole program to another language to be able to use the symbols (which is making me wonder how many letters are in other alphabets) but it sounds like I'm going to have to cut down on my current use of keys to make room for some replacement ones. Unless you have any more ideas, thank you for your help

[alank99101739]

I wonder if it is key codes rather than characters it is listening for. E.g. I tried "$" (shift-4) but it was the same as just "4". So it is not characters it is listening to, but keycodes.

I wonder if you could use the numeric keypad keycodes as different from the number keycodes? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13196945/keycode-values-for-numeric-keypad - you would have to use your mouse program to "hit" the key to type in the value for the binding. Low chance of working I suspect, but just wondering if the numeric keypad keys match the "alpha numeric" rule... Sorry, that is my last idea, but some of the Adobe engineers are on during the week. They might have another idea. MIDI events is the only other one I can think of.

[aronm15237262]

Yeah, it's only regestering it as a number press unfortunetely. I'll hold out hope with of the adobe team has an idea but I think I'm redoing my triggers and previous coding :'(
Thank you so much for your ideas though, I never would've thought to try other languages