Welcome to Disassembled

In this blog I start with disassembled components, viewing all of the constituent parts of these amazing little pieces of software. I will commence by examining the pieces of the puzzle and then proceed step by step to reassemble what I’ve taken apart.

Shout out to James May - The Reassembler - TV Series

The first disassembled component is a little interactive Floorplan I’ve been working on for a tour of an old Gasworks in Adelaide. The site is being redeveloped while retaining a number of heritage features and buildings.

The image below shows all the parts that go to make up the Floorplan Component such as screentint, map elements, images, overlay, text elements, containers, graphics, logic blocks, actions, variables, triggers, timer, and text.

All that’s left to do is to put it together.

Our starting point, the disassembled Map Component [click to view larger]

This is the finished example showing the floorplan component, reassembled. It uses cookies (thanks to Martin for a great webinar on cookies) and variables to maintain certain states such as the “Click a marker to open the location” text and the “show overlay:” text as well as setting the cookies for the last node viewed and the last view.

Note: on testing I’ve discovered that the cookies aren’t applied when the tour is within and iframe as shown below. I’ll look into the issue and post a solution if it becomes available. To see the version working with cookies you can visit the tour here.

In the meantime I suggest viewing this Pano2VR 101 Skins webinar. Starting at 2:40s, Martin Hopkins [Hopki] talks about the Component Toolbox, organizing and finding components, adding components to the toolbox, and building a skin from components. It will give you a great background to components.

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