4.11 Preferences

In this dialog you can configure some general settings of Hollywood Designer that are used for all projects that you open with Designer. The dialog is divided into the following pages: General, Palette, Thumbnails, File extensions, Hollywood, and Plugins.

a) General

This page allows you to configure the following options:

‘Always ask before saving’

If you check this option, Designer will always ask you to confirm that you really want to save the project. This is useful if you often hit the "Save" button accidentally.

‘Always ask before deleting non-empty pages’

If you check this option, Designer will always ask you to confirm the deletion of non-empty pages.

‘Always ask which language to load when opening multilingual projects’

If you check this option, Hollywood Designer will always ask you to choose the language that you want to use when opening project that has more than one language set.

‘Keep position when editing the source file of an object’

When this is set and you change the source file of a brush, anim, or video object, Hollywood Designer won't reset its position to the top-left corner any more.

‘Show progress bar when loading pages’

By default Designer will show a progress bar when loading pages. On very fast computers it might not make sense to show a progress bar when Designer loads a project page because it will take only a fraction of a second. In that case, you might want to turn this option off.

‘Grid and guides’

Here you can configure the color and style of grids and guides that can be shown by selecting the corresponding menu item in the "Edit" menu. You can also set the snap distance that should be used when "Snap to grid" and/or "Snap to guides" is active.

b) Defaults

This page allows you to configure the following options:

‘Default page dimensions’

Here you can enter a default size for new blank, pattern, and gradient pages. Whenever you create such a page, Designer will use the dimensions specified here as the default ones.

‘Default anchor point’

The anchor point setting that you specify here will be inherited by all new objects that you create. By default, this is set to 0.5/0.5 which means that the anchor point will be in the center of every new object.

c) Palette

This page allows you to configure the following options:

‘Keep color window open’

If you check this option, Designer will not close the color chooser window when you hit the "OK" button. This is useful if you need to change the color of many different objects or if you have a very large screen that has room for the color chooser window as well.

‘Copy color from active object’

If you check this option, the color chooser will always automatically receive the foreground color of the currently active object.

‘User palette’

Here you can define 48 personal colors that you use regularly. You can then access these colors very easily by clicking the "Load user color" button in the color chooser.

d) Thumbnails

This tab allows you to configure the settings of Hollywood Designer's thumbnail viewer. You can specify the thumbnail size in pixels, as well as whether or not anti-aliased scaling should be used.

e) File extensions

This tab allows you to set the file extensions Hollywood Designer should use for the filter masks in its file requesters. There are four different groups here: Image, Anim, Sound, and Video. The individual extensions must be separated by vertical bar characters.

f) Hollywood

This page allows you to specify additional arguments that should be passed to Hollywood when running or compiling a project. For example, if you want to use the inbuilt resource monitor when running a script, you could add the option "-resourcemonitor" here. It also allows you to change the path where Designer should look for Hollywood and you can choose whether or not Hollywood should show its startup screen when running your project.

g) Loaders

This page allows you to configure the loader priorities for animations, images, sounds and videos. You can specify the order in which animation, image, sound, and video loaders are queried to open the corresponding data files. Designer supports the loader types "Inbuilt" (loaders provided by Designer itself), "Native" (loaders provided by the host OS, e.g. datatypes on Amiga compatibles) and "Plugins" (loaders provided by plugins). By default, plugins are asked first, then inbuilt loaders, then native ones but this order can be freely changed in this tab by moving the individual loader types up or down.

h) Plugins

This tab allows you to choose plugins that should be disabled or that should be required at start. Note that it is normally not necessary to manually require plugins because plugins are automatically activated. However, there are some exceptions: For example, the Polybios plugin is not automatically activated because it needs lots of resources. Thus, if you want to use Polybios, you need to explicitly select it here in the "Require plugins" list to tell Hollywood Designer to load it at start. Note that changes here will not take effect before you restart Hollywood Designer.