Intro to Adding Icons, Tools, Ladders and Apparatus to Your Fire Simulation
[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]Hello and welcome. In this video I’m going to show you some of the new features in SimsUshare 2.5, particularly how to add your own victims, apparatus, tools, and things like that. So let’s say now you’ve opened up, you’ve installed SimsUshare 2.5, the big new thing we have here is if you go into utility, there’s a new plugin called Picture. Click on Picture, it opens up a browser window. This is for Windows and Mac. And I get to choose a picture, PNG, JPEG or GIF. I click on Open and it copies it right in there. There’s my new picture. You can see just like other effects, I can make it bigger or smaller, I can rotate it if I want, put it wherever I’d like, and it has a certain set of properties.
I can re-choose a different image, I can change brightness, opacity, color, blur. Blur might be useful if I want to kind of make it blend into the scene a little bit more. See what other things are there, transform is for flipping it, different horizontal vertical, delay timings, so all my timing, fade-in, fade-out, a new section called Tap Control, and something I’ll get into in a minute called Add to Picture Cache. So these are the new sets of things that are available with your own picture, which can be victims, it can be tools, it can be apparatus. Really anything that you want to put. So I’m done here, I play, here’s my ladder, and that’s basic.
Now, what you can do more than just the basic is, let’s say now I want to use this ladder somewhere else. I could certainly copy and paste it. I can click on it and use my copy function to copy it somewhere else, to copy it to a different scenario. But we also realize you may want to create a cache of pictures, certain icons or things that you use a lot. So if we go into Properties, you’ll see something over here that says “Add to Picture Cache.” If I click on it, it will say what category do I want to use? Let’s say I’ll call it “Picture Cache,” I click “Ok.” It says give me a title for this, because I’m going to have to know what it is just from the name. So I’m going to call it “Side Ladder.” So I hit “Ok” and it says “Added to the picture Cache.” Now if I’m anywhere else, even here, if I look I have a new category “Picture Cache.” So I can actually now add it to really any scenario. It stays in my cache, I don’t have to worry about that original picture. So I go to this scenario and if I want to bring in my ladder, there it is and I can now manipulate and do everything that I want.
If I decide that I don’t want it in Picture Cache, I want it in some other category, maybe I want to create a ladder category. What I can do is go into, when I’m ready to edit, I go “Manage Picture Cache.” Notice here it has Picture Cash. I say well, Side Ladder. I’m going to change it. Instead of side ladder being in the Picture Cache, I’m going to edit it and say I’m going to create a new category called Ladders. And so I click Ladders and I say what’s the title for this, I’ll leave it “Side Ladder,” hit “Okay,” and now it says Ladders, Side Ladder. I can add more ladders, I can do whatever I want, add more categories. When I go back here, let me get rid of this over here, and now notice there is a new category, Ladders so I can create my own categories with my own pictures that have it really very easily to quickly load. I don’t have to remember where those pictures were on my disk or copy them from other scenarios.
So for example, I could actually go here, let’s say into this scenario. Let’s say I want to now have some markers. So I can actually go and say, I’ll add a picture, let’s say that’s going to be my Battalion Chief 1, I can go in here and if I add it to the Picture Cache, I’ll call it over here like “Apparatus Markers”, I click “Ok” and I call this one “BC1,” now all of a sudden––that picture is just there, it’s not part of the cache, I’m going to delete it from here––but if I look at my menu, there is BC1. I can keep doing that, create engines and ladders and create other categories. Do that’s a way that if I wanted to bring BC1, one quickly I just go to Apparatus Markers, BC1.
Now, the trouble here is, let’s say I have my map. Let’s go over to some overhead view, and I’m going to say bring in Battalion Chief 1. And actually let me put a little panel underneath it. So I’m going to use one of my utilities which is the shape. So I say here shape, rotate that, scale it up. Sort of almost like a little panel of different tokens. I’m going to show you how you can actually move the markers around. So I’m going to go here to make it just a little bit of a strip, bring it down over to the bottom, and let me drop it there. So now, I can go here and it’s almost like I’m going to be using to place my marker. You’ll see here there is the thing, but I can’t really move it. That’s not very useful. What you might have seen originally, there was something there in the properties for the picture. Click on it and say Tap Control. Tap Control, I can either like other pictures and victims, clear it on tap by tapping on it, hide or show, or make it movable. So to make it movable, I say yes. Now when it’s movable, watch what happens.
If I’m here in this scenario and I say Battalion One we’re going to put up over here. So while I’m playing my scenario, I actually can move tokens around on the screen. So when I go down, let’s say, back to my street view, if I go over somewhere else, that positon stays exactly where it is. So I can say, Battalion One we should change our command post up to off on this road. So now not only can you bring your own pictures in and map markers, but you can also move them around and make them clickable. So this is a really powerful feature. Let me show you what I did if I go down over here, I created a whole set of tokens. So if I go to my map view here, you see I created Engine 1, Engine 22, so now I can actually do all of my placement, and you can certainly make more than one, Ladder 1, Ladder 2, Ladder 6, or whatever, little panel over here. You can make extra tokens, and map markers to do your apparatus placement or any kind of planning.
So that gives you a little bit of a view of the new features. Let me go back to where I had Side D. I have my ladder, I have my picture, and I’m able to remember, take a look here add to Picture Cache, which creates a new menu category, add in Tap Control, make it movable, make it tap to clear, as well as all the delay timing that you expect. Fade-in when, Fade-in duration, Fade out, and also setting the timing. That’s just a quick overview, relatively, of the new features. We hope you like them, certainly let us know, give us a question, feedback, we love to hear from you. Thank you.
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