At 21:28 +0800 04/29/2002, noelle cheng wrote:
>I believe I have found the solution and it has nothing to do with
>library palettes or the PI.
>
>It was because I used the lingo command pause, so that the playback
>head was stopped.
Yeah, that'll do it all right. Pause suspends *everything* including
frame or stage updates.
>If the lingo command pause causes problems, why is this still being
>included in Director?
It doesn't cause problems, actually; there are times when you want to
suspend all operations, such as when a MIAW has been backgrounded,
perhaps, and you don't want it eating processor cycles to refresh
itself when there's no reason for it to do so.
It's still around for backward compatibility with older files.
>Does this apply to the other properties:
>
>Tempo
>Wait for mouseclick or keypress
>Wait for cuepoint
>
>So it is better not to use them?
That's not as easy to answer. Tempo changes are useful in the Score,
and if you want your projector to hold on a frame while a QT is
playing and then go to the next one after the QT file has finished,
the cuepoint commands are useful too.
They're kind of a way to asisgn rudimentary functionality; for
anything really complex you probably will want to write some code.
>>Actually I've gotten to the point that I don't use movie scripts at
>>all any more, but that's almost a philosophical thing as much as it
>>is an issue of programming approach.
>
>Philosophical ? That’s surprising.
Is it? I don't know. All programming at this point is roughly on par
with the way furniture was manufactured 300 years ago. It's all done
by hand, one piece at a time, without anything like an assmbly line.
I suppose now we have some tools, analogues to lathes for instance,
but for the most part software is still very much a hand-crafted
artifact. Thus you'll see a lot of personal expression in it, and you
will see a lot of passionate discussion about philosophical
perspectives, what's elegant, what's baroque, and whether a stool
should have three legs or four.
OOP design is philosophical as much as it is anyhing else and I think
I can say with almost perfect confidence that in 50 years it won't
even be in use any more. I don't know what will replace it, but
something will.
This is why programming can be so unfulfilling, if you want to define
your life around your work. (That's not a good idea anyway.) You have
to practice nonattachment to what you do. That's a rather difficult
concept for many to grasp, particularly the Western mind. But
programs are very, very ephemeral, much more so than most other
products. Even automobiles are more likely to last longer than most
programs.
>Something must have prompted you to provide the solution as using a
>movie script or maybe it was the way the module was written…
More the latter than the former, yes. If there's a Dir9 rewrite I've
already decided I'm going to drop all references to movie scripts.
>I know that I should not have brought it up but when I was studying
>it, I did not understand why you provided the solution in this
>manner.
Old-school application, actually. When I began using Director all we
had was movie scripts and macros. So I still tended to think in those
terms for introductory material until comparatively recently, when I
realized thet getting started in Director with an OOP framework made
a hell of a lot more sense than mentioning anything else. But by then
the book had hit the press.
--
Warren Ockrassa | http://www.nightwares.com/
Director help | Free files | Sample chapters | Freelance | Consulting
Author | Director 8.5 Shockwave Studio: A Beginner's Guide
Published by Osborne/McGraw-Hill
http://www.osborne.com/indexes/beginners_guides.shtml
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