ZoomTopic Manual - CONTENTS

1. Prepare - write your presentation or plan your gallery

2. Edit - copy and edit the template gallery which is supplied with the software you have downloaded

3. Create - convert the new gallery into a set of files which will autorun as a 3D world

4. Copy - copy the files to the top level folder of a recordable CD or DVD

5. Run - try out your presentation or gallery on your own computer and on someone else's

1 - Prepare

Read this section if you have not written presentations before - or would like to be reminded of the key points. You may also find our links page useful for writing presentations.

Goals of your presentation
- present ideas/information
- be understood
- be remembered
- trigger a response

Benefits of ZoomTopic
- templates
- quick and easy
- memorable
- portable

Planning the presentation
- What message do you want you audience to take home?
- What concepts do your audience need to understand?
- Set the scene, a context for your message, at the start
- Don't be afraid to repeat yourself, people learn through repetition
- Give examples
- Tell them the benefits
- Your audience remembers more if it likes you, so talk as a friend
- Anecdotes are memorable - especially when humourous

Writing something down
- Divide your message into five sections
- Give each section a heading or title
- State goals in the introduction section one
- Review what you have presented in the final section
- Then explain a problem or give an example after the introduction
- Next explain how the problem is resolved
- Finally give other benfits of your recommended solution
- If you need more than the five sections, extend or add sections as needed
- Remember, what you write will be the take-home message for your audience, but do not make the mistake of simply reading out these headings. Instead talk around them and refer to them as a summary of each of the points you want to make.

Final check
- Does your audience know what they should do next?
- Can you audience get in touch with you if they want?
- Does your audience know how to buy from you?

2 - Edit

Save the Star Gallery Template to a new file
- Right click on the ROOMS background
- Select the "World" menu option and then the "Save As..." option
- Create a new subfolder from the Save As dialog and change to that folder
- Save this Star Gallery world to a new filename in your new folder
- If you don't do this you will end up changing your master template
- [If you need to recover the template, re-install ROOMS/ZoomTopic]

Changing the pictures on the walls
- Your presentation is going to appear in the pictures on the walls
- [It doesn't have to. This is just the easiest to start with]
- Use the arrow keys to move in the world. Use the mouse to select items.
- Right click on the first picture on the wall.
- Select the "Quick Edit..." menu option
- The Quick edit menu is displayed.

Adding Images to a frame on the wall
- If you want to display an image in the picture frame you just clicked on, browse for the picture you want and then just click apply.
NB (i) Your picture must be in bitmap format, (ii) Either your picture must match the aspect ratio of the frame you use, or you need to add blocking to your picture on disk, otherwise it will be stretched when displayed.
- Once you have the image you want, click the Apply button in the Quick Edit Dialog

Adding Text to a frame on the wall
- If you want to display text in the picture frame, Type your text in the "Text as Picture" field. This will contain your bullet points. RETURN and SPACE are allowed.
- Now select a font and a background colour for your text using the buttons in the Quick Edit dialog
- Next generate an image file from your text, by clicking the "Make picture from Text" button
- Finally, check what you have generated, by clicking the "Preview and modify picture" button.
NB (i) you can repeat this process until your text appears as you wish (ii) you can cut and paste and drag portions of the text-image in the image editor, (iii) you can even generate your own text in the image editor (and ignore what Quick Edit generates for you)
- Once you have the text-image you want, click the Apply button in the Quick Edit Dialog

Repeat the process for all the frames you need.

Save your gallery world regularly, and you may want to save it to a progression of different file names so that you can recover an earlier version if you find you want to change something later (or in case your computer crashes).

3 - Create

You use the ROOMS "Normalizer" to copy all the files for your "Star Gallery" world into a single folder
- Make sure you have saved your Star Gallery world [right click>World>Save As]
- Remember it will start from the same place as your last save
- From the right click menu, select the "use design menu" option
- Right click again and select "Normalizer..."
- The Normalizer dialog appears. Click on the "Select World..." button
- Locate and open the Star Gallery world file which you most recently saved
- Click on the "Normalize" button
- Note that the Normalizer creates a sub-folder from your selected Star Gallery world and copies all the files it needs into that fodler.
NB Do not run the world which the normalizer has created. Running it will undo normalization

Copy additional files to the Normalization folder so ROOMS will autoplay
- Right click and select the "ZoomTopic..." option from your design mode menu
- click on the "..." button by the world field to select the world you want to autorun (this is the normalized world just created by the normalizer)
- Enter a title for your world, this will appear as the title of the ZoomTopic window when it displays your ROOMS world
- Decide whether you want your Star Gallery to autorun in full screen mode or in a fixed-size window and click either "Specify" if you don't want "Full screen"
- Decide what you want to be able to do when this world autoruns. For example, if you are distributing the CD, you may not want anyone to be able to edit it.
- Optionally, you can save your settings as a project file so you can come back and make changes later
- Now click on the "Create CD Content" button
- This copies other files to the normalization folder
NB Do not run the world which the normalizer has created. Running it will undo normalization

Look at the next Manual section for to copy to CD, and how

4 - Copy

However, it is important to copy the contents your newly Normalized/autorun folder to the highest level in folder of the CD i.e. its drive letter.

All ZoomTopic normalized worlds will contain a file called autorun.inf and a subfolder called bin.

You need to copy everything from the Normalization/autorun folder to CD so that these (and accompanying files) appear on the final CD as:

D:\_doorup.rvc
D:\autorun.inf
D:\blue_bricks_00.bmp
...etc
D:\bin\EVACEdit.exe
D:\bin\glu32.dll
...etc

Where "D:" is your CD or DVD drive letter.

5 - Run

Specifically, you need to test your CD/DVD on PCs which do not have (and preferably never have had) ROOMS installed, and you need to test your CD/DVD on a variety of Windows operating systems (Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP etc) to make sure that everything works as you expect under all circumstances.

Be aware that if you decided to specify a window size for your ZoomTopic presentation (rather than full screen) a user PC could, conceivably, be set up with a smaller screen size and this will cause problems.

Expect to use a few CDs/DVDs experimenting with what you can do, before you have everything as you wish.

Enjoy!