FlashPanos

Welcome!

You might be here to find exciting and useful add-ons for and information about Flash Panorama Player... Well, we think you've come to the right place! [update] If you've come here to find useful information, user forums and more for Flash based VR panorama/virtual tour players like krpano, lucid viewer, pano2vr, etc -- well, you've still come to the right place!

FlashPanos.com began after two FPP users (and FPP evangelists!), Patrick Cheatham and Zephyr Renner, began posting their FPP plugins and updates to the Flash Panorama Player forums. Patrick and Zephyr also began talking off-list, and decided a better way to present user-contributed plugins for FPP would be on a third-party site. FlashPanos is born! Read on for more...

OK!

So, you want to make a Flash container with all your own graphics and buttons and load your Flash Panorama Player presentation into it? Here you go... a quick "embed pano 101".

What you'll end up with is a "skinned" player which displays your FPP panorama with an irregular outline (not a rectangle!) -- including buttons to load panoramas, buttons to pan/tilt/zoom, and a button to "go fullscreen".

Topping it all off you'll be able to go fullscreen and leave some of your buttons & graphics behind, then leave fullscreen and get your buttons back. This allows you to display what you want when you want it. The FPP XML in this example will show some thumbnails in fullscreen, which display larger photos.

As a bonus in this example, we will load lower resolution panoramas into the player when not in fullscreen; then, when going fullscreen, we will load higher resolution panoramas. Once loaded, these higher resolution panoramas will stay in the cache and be seen in fullscreen and not fullscreen. So, there's a lot packed into this 'little' example!

2008-01-08 01:33:37 +0000

Super flexible dropdown (or dropup) menu for pano-to-pano navigation in an FPP presentation. Contributed by Patrick Cheatham. Easy to use and powerful! Now at Version 3.0.

You won't need to hand-code a Flash ComboBox again! This will allow you to define the panorama names and links from within your FPP XML document, making adding a dropdown a truly dynamic experience. The panorama names you define show up as the label for the menu, and the links are used to load new panoramas into your presentation. As an added bonus, it will also load panoramas from a hotspot click in your FPP presentation!

demo:
Setting all parameters
Setting only panorama links

By popular demand, a plugin which lets you create a custom context menu (right click menu) for your FPP presentation! Insert as many menu items and links as you want (up to Adobe's limit of 15). And, it's free to download and use!

06/24/2008 update:

This is the first part of a multi part series of tutorials written by Zephyr Renner and Patrick Cheatham that will look at some of the advanced functionality a user can produce by getting beyond what can be accomplished with Flash Panorama Player's XML configuration files, and getting into programming Actionscript (AS3).

There are a number of ways to create Actionscript based interaction with FPP, and primary amongst them is with a plugin, so that is where we are going to start.

Submitted by FlashPanos fan and FPP user doubledrop.

This exercise has been written to help other novice users of FPP like myself, and who are struggling with the full screen function.

This is an example of creating an auto-presentation for your panorama. Contributed by Patrick Cheatham.

Using a short series of custom functions in your XML file, Flash Panorama Player can move your panorama through a series of pan, tilt and zoom movements.

This example also shows how to write and name your custom functions, keeping them grouped together in your global element. This way you always know where your functions are and how to target them.

AutoHorizon is a super flexible plugin which makes your virtual tour panorama go to its horizon after a predefined period of time (and more!). Automatically finds the shortest path to the horizon (no more whirling hotspots!). Contributed by Patrick Cheatham. Easy to use and powerful!

Fellow FPP enthusiast Chen Luo has created a handful of cool Lens Flare plugins ("smart hotspots") for everyone to use. Included are example SWFs, XML files, and the source FLA files.

Simply place your favorite Lens Flare SWF as a <spot/> in your FPP XML file, give it a pan and tilt placement, and away you go!

Example usage:

The HideAPano "encryption" utility is finally ready for public use!