Some thoughts...
>> Perhaps you could support calls to QScript or similar in wired movies. This
>> single feature would allow developers to have intimate control of all QT4
>> features such as tracks, sprites, transitions, MIDI, samples, and QTVR, as
>> developers could embed the interactivity into QT4 with a product such as
>> LiveStage which MetaCard could then call.
>
> Interactivity (including QTVR) should just work. You can't get any
> information into or out of the movie from a script, but we haven't
> seen any examples where this is essential (e.g., if you need
> track-selecting support, you can build it into the movie). There are
> lots of cases where having direct access to certain things in movies
> could be useful, but QT has so many features that it's very difficult
> to pick and choose what should be available from the scripting
> language. Without better guidance, we'd inevitably waste a huge
> amount of time implementing things that no one would use and probably
> end up missing many of the features that would be truly useful.
My suggestion is that you implement something like "send someMsg to 00:00 of
movie movieName", and that this would then call the appropriate QScript. Not
being a low level programmer I've no idea how hard this is to implement. I
am thinking of something like the relationship between AppleScript and Java,
or Director and Javascript (with evalScript).
I have specialist requirements for this but I will try to generalise these
below:
>
>> Oh yes, and then I could use MetaCard instead of Director -:)
>
> A list of what Director features you're using that you can't do with
> MetaCard + some QT authoring tool would be very useful to see. Even
> better would be details on what the Lingo API for these things is and
> how you'd recommend improving it for xTalk ;-)
Transitions. I need to use high quality transitions as a lot of the material
I need to publish involves graphical content. Further I need realtime
transitions so that when a viewer wishes to see the next image or video
sequence they can navigate to it. Some of the time I can pre-plan this for
them, but most of the time I want them to be able to browse the visual
material. I frequently want to make hypertext links between text and
movies/images - and I want smooth fades or other effects when this happens.
In Director I can use an ever increasing set of 3rd party visual transitions
which look great full screen (in order to replace the really awful built in
transitions that Director comes with).
I also wish to create online community game like environments, and the
flexibility of using high quality graphic transitions (under script control)
is also important here.
The thought I had was that if I could store a lot of the graphics I needed
in QT tracks, in a similar way to how I would use a cast in Director and be
able to call on the variety of built in audio-visual effects and transitions
built into QT4 (with some 3rd party transitions already becoming available),
by a combination of scripting within QT4 and calling these scripts from
Metacard, I could achieve results such as:
1) User clicks on a word in a Metacard field
2) Metacard looks this up in a database and interprets this as a request
3) Metacard translates this request to a frame number, track number, and
transition name
4) Metacard calls the "showMedia" method in QT4 passing parameters or
setting global variables so that the appropriate frma is shown with the
appropriate transition.
Even better would be to be able to direct QT4 to use separately stored media
or media streams.
