I've got a movie that's pretty static - no animations, nothing sexy. Just good old application development stuff.
Anyway, I've got this listing of 10 files that I'm displaying, and the way I'm doing it is this: a repeat loop where I toss each line's info to be displayed to a movie script that parses the info, creates a text member for each bit of info (each line has maybe 4 bits of info, ie name, title, date, status, etc)....the getLineInfo script then returns that line's image. Then each line is drawn to a buffer image, then, when each line is returned, it takes a sprite and makes the buffer image its own. Since this has to play on slower machines, I'm pretty careful about image depth (in some cases using 8bit, in others 16 as the text renders cleaner), and all in all it's pretty damn quick and I'm impressed. Question 1 - and I'm not sure how to phrase this one - I'm wondering the way that director itself renders images in the score - is it similar to imaging lingo? Or is imaging lingo allowing the developers to hook into the way the stage/score is displayed? Since my app is extremely static and doing nothing as sexy as Charles' blurs, etc, I don't think I have much to worry about...but... I'm just in the process of adding an object that the menu - which displays local and remote files - can, upon user click, ask the fetcher object to grab the remote file. The fetcher object is passed a pointer to the menuscripts line proplist, and inserts a status property, then tells the menu script to redraw the full menu of 10. So, in other words, if there are 10 files listed, 9 local, one remote, when the user clicks on the one remote, it tells the fetcher to grab it. Fetcher starts the download and sends the download percent to the menu script, and tells the menu script to redraw (timeout object repeats this while download is active). I'm starting to think that each line's image when returned by the getLineIMage script could be kept in the proplist. That way rather than redrawing the buffer of 10 images, I'm just redrawing those with active downloads and re-inserting in the buffer. But my worry is that keeping 10 strips of line images and a buffer might be more memory than needed (each strip is 640x30, 16bit)...and at first, I thougth I'd just keep adding the strips image to the menu proplist (which could be 1 to x numbers), I should only keep the 10 or less strips that are invisible on screen? Any thoughts or is this just too unclear? [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!]
