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.
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| 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. |
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.