using timers, timeline

Hello,
my name is Guenther Grauel. I live in the middle of Germany near the town of Kassel. I work as an Artist. Today most of this work uses Computers. For an exhibition I had the Idea of somehow “living portraits”, the face of a person on a computer screen showing artificial emotions. I made the portrait as a background image and parts of the face, the eyes, the mouth as sprites that are played in front of it. I wrote a programm for the project with an old version of Gamemaker and it did a good job. The different sprites are combined with the background image by random and therefore you see a big number of combinations that are interpreted as emotions of the person. But I can use this program only with windows. For an exhibition I use boxes with a screen an a rapberry-pi. This small computer works with Linux. I tried to rewrite the programm with a newer version of Gamemaker which can work under Linux. But there were lots of difficulties. Therefore I looked for something else and found GDevelop 5. It seemed easy. But now I reached a point, where I don’t know , how to go on

question #1: I have sprites of eyes or mouth moving. I want to play them forward, e.g. closing eyes then wait some time and then
play the sprite backward. I found timer-events, but I don’t know how to use them. How can I tell the timer the length
of a pause?
question #2: Can I make a timeline, to make sprites visible/invisible, to play them forward/backward, to choose different sprites
by random?

I read the docs/wiki and tried some of the tutorials, but didn’t find answers to my questions. I think these problems could be solved easyly for someone who knows.

Waiting for answer.

Thank you.

Hi,

#1: Click “Add a condition”, and pick “value of a timer”.
Fill in the value, name the timer, and voilà. Use the “start/reset timer” action to reset the counter.
Regarding your animations, it will probably be easier to make the full animation open>closed>open, and play the animation again whenever you want.

I didn’t get #2, sorry. If you want to show/hide objects, there are actions for that.