Re: Wishlist gloom (Was Getting rid of "Internal"?)

[Buzz Kettles]

At 7:59 PM +0100 10/23/02, you wrote:

----- Original Message -----
From: "Howdy-Tzi" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

 There are fundamental realities about the Director architecture, and
 the internal cast is one of them. I think what Buzz is indicating is
 that it would essentially require a top-down rewrite of the entire

 > Director engine --

I wasn't suggesting that at all  :)

 while breaking ALL backward compatibility to all

 previous file formats -- to accomplish that.

That would suggest that Director is really badly written. I would only
request something like this on the assumption that it is trivial to
implement. In a half decent architecture it should be a few lines of code at
most.

It's *possible* that it wouldn't be all that difficult to do.

BUT

Since the concept of cast is so integral to Director, there probably needs to be at least 1 cast at all times. Allowing none breaks the application metaphor completely & expands the potential issues astronomically

So if this idea was to be considered, the implementation might be that the default Internal might be removable AFTER another cast had been added (& then this other one would become unremovable). That way all the internal member refs & sprite refs would not have to deal with the case of pointing to cast 0.

The biggest obstacle I would anticipate is the extra testing/debugging
requirement, given that there may be some code that (incorrectly) depends on
the assumption that the internal cast exists.

- Robert

Ah yes - testing such a 'feature mod' would have a big cost.

Also there are certain cases that generate more engineering issues:

If the default internal had been removed & some external had been substituted (& was now 'the required cast'), I'll bet that the movie could not be opened if that external cast was missing ... and in order to find out what that casts name was, there would be error dialog work required

& there'd be some impact on movie streaming in Shockwave ...

& ...

hth

-Buzz


[To remove yourself from this list, or to change to digest mode, go to http://www.penworks.com/lingo-l.cgi To post messages to the list, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Problems, email [EMAIL PROTECTED]). Lingo-L is for learning and helping with programming Lingo. Thanks!]