Did you made the first window (loading window with that growing bar, when loading the NeoClassix game) with Neobook. If so, how? With PlayCartoonFile? If so, how did you do the timing. If not I'm very curious about your solution: because loading Neobook publications need sometimes too much time too load...! - Reinier

Ronnie's reply: The initial splash screen with loading bar is a new feature available in NeoBook v3.2c, under the 'Book - Book Setup - Access Control' dialog option. There is a vertical scroll bar shown on the left -scroll down (about halfway) until you see the "Splash Screen to Display while Publication is Loading (compiled pubs only)". Specify the image file to be used, and this image will then be automatically displayed during loading. The progress bar is automatically 'appended' to the bottom portion of the screen.

One method to reduce the time taken during loading is to reduce the number of scripting actions in all pages. I have developed a kiosk demo (800x600 with 24-bit color depth) with more than 50 pages, and the compiled size is 18MB. But when I run the demo, the time taken for the first page to appear is quite fast (less than 4 seconds, loading from a CD-ROM drive). However, for my NeoClassix game which is about 1MB, the time taken for loading (until the first page appears) is about 6-10 seconds (loading from hard disk). And the game screen size is small, and the number of pages is less than 10! The longer time taken (from my observation) is due to the extensive game routines (scripting lines) used. Without the splash screen, the time taken to load my NeoClassix will be far too long and users may assume that they have not clicked properly, and re-click the program again. Consequently, 2 copies of the same program are loaded. Thanks to v3.2c, users are 'visually' informed of the estimated time taken to load the file.

When a main program (say, PARENT.EXE) executes another program (say, CHILD.EXE) using the "DosCommand" action, is the PARENT.EXE program still in memory or only a basic 'shell' code is left so that when CHILD.EXE ends, it will return to PARENT.EXE? If this is so, how much memory is being used up by this 'shell' code?

Neosoft's reply: When a compiled NeoBook publication is run, only a small portion of the file is loaded into memory at any given time. Elements like images, text and media files are cached in and out of memory when they are needed. The amount of actual memory used can vary during the execution of the program and is dependant on which elements are actually in use at that time. NeoBook will also allo Windows 95 to free up memory for use by other programs. Technically, there should be no problem running one publication from another. And unlike DOS, Windows does a good job of providing resources to multiple programs.

What is the maximum number of user-definable variables allowed in NeoBook?

Neosoft's reply: There is no real limit to the number of user-defined variables in NeoBook. Variables are allocated dynamically and would be limited only by the amount of memory available. With Windows' ability to use virtual memory, you shouldn't worry about running out of variables. If needed, you can released memory used by a variable, by setting its value to an empty string. For example: