On Sat, 16 Oct 1999, David Bovill wrote:
> >> 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).
Not being a QT programmer, I don't even know if it's *possible* to do
this ;-) But it's something we'll look into...
> > 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.
Transitions are really a special case because you can use them without
having a "movie" at all (you just give QT two images and a transition,
and it just does it). As such, it wouldn't involve the player object
and would be wired to the "visual effect" command instead. This is
already on the feature-request list.
> 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.
This is something a little more advanced than just transitions because
it might actually involves editing the movie itself. But a quick and
dirty solution to this problem (assuming QT transitions were available
via "visual effect") would be to use two player objects showing
different frames of the same movie and just ping-pong between them
using hide and show with visual effect. I guess we'll find out if
this is sufficient once the transitions support is implemented...
Regards,
Scott
********************************************************
Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com
MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that...
