Activities

Activities are a key concept behind FirstStage: they describe the time-like behaviour of things.

Activities act upon a subject thing and occasionally other things (e.g., the activity for a character holding a prop has the character as subject and the prop as object).

An activity has a Start Time and a Duration that determine when the activity plays. It is typically represented as a block on the timeline.

You can drag an activity along the timeline to change when it happens.

For some activities, you can also stretch the duration or trim/reveal clips: point at the activity to reveal triangular handles at the end and then drag the handle.

If you point at an activity on the Timeline and press the Inspect button, a menu will pop up with options depending on the type of activity.

Delete	Delete the activity from the timeline.
Duplicate	Duplicate the activity and place the copy immediately afterwards. This is useful for building a sequence of repeated actions.
Split	Split the activity into two parts before and after the current time. This is only available for clip activities which span the current time.
Edit	Shows a screen where you can change the behaviour of the activity. Return here by pressing the top-left arrow or the thumbpad back arrow. This is only available for some activities like Rigid Animations.

Keyframes

Some activities contain a series of keyframes that are interpolated between. Such an activity is shown with a transparent background and a solid pip for each keyframe.

You can drag the keyframe pip along the timeline to change its timing. To change the value of a keyframe you should scrub to the keyframe and then change the original property in the same way you first created it.

You can also delete a keyframe by summoning the menu with the Inspect button.