Re: LDM's and TELL is NOT obsolete whatever MM says

[Rob Romanek]

I'm just going to through my 2 cents in on this matter.
A couple years ago I "penned" a letter to MM which I posted to Direct-L 
requesting that MM move to full support of LDMs, I cited the advancements 
in Flash and also experiences with my students as to why I thought this 
would be a good thing. I don't think I went about it in an abrasive 
manner, but rather an agressive one, I think there is a difference. And 
most importantly for me is that I put my name to my opinions. I hoped that 
that action would put some weight to my requests instead of simply being 
some anonymous entity. Some time after that post and in response to others 
on other Director topics John Dowdell (from MM) posted a relatively 
in-depth statement on weighing the cost of implementation vs the return 
and the ever shrinking budgets, manpower etc. I think this is the 
tightrope that the Director team is constantly walking and they may also 
be getting tired of explaining it over and over. Right now I prefer to 
focus on the positive. As Tom McCrystal said this is version 1 of the new 
object model so there are things that it will not cover, not only that but 
it has to maintain backward compatibility (I don't think Flash had the 
same level of legacy code to maintain when it was restructured). I 
personally think it is a great version! With focusing on the positive I 
think that I'll see more responses from Tom Higgins and the Director team 
when I'm looking for help and clarification than if I was constantly 
harping (and I would prefer Tom H focus his energies on that then 
constantly defending Director). Finally, like to think that the one area 
of expertise I have to offer with Director is with LDMs and if I can help 
people out on the lists in this area then more people will try to use 
them, and more postings and questions may help leverage the level of 
importance of LDMs and bring about their full implementation sooner. I 
think that is the case in this version of Director. Having been on the 
beta I saw how they evolved into being part of the DOM when they could 
have easily been left out because of time considerations and this 
inclusion has greatly increased the ability to use them and bodes well for 
their future.

Rob

On Mon, 13 Sep 2004 20:39:06 +0100, Evil Kosh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 
wrote:

ok, perhaps they are under a lot of stress, but they arent explaining 
themselves much either, upon the question of fully operational LDM's 
whats your engineering team say about it? where is the QA about it, 
where is the explanation about why it's apparently so hard to do 
something which should have been in years ago, people, like me, get 
frustrated sometimes not because you dont do some feature we request, 
but because you dont give us features we request and then dont explain 
WHY, we have a very valid reason for wanting LDM's fully operational and 
MM's only explanation to this day is that macromedia does not endorse 
the use of LDM's.  Care to explain why?  Would it be because you havent 
quite figured out how to do it yet?  Dont just sit there saying you work 
really hard, tell me why this feature has remained relatively 
undocumented and so hard to find out about.  The flash team certainly 
didnt have as much trouble in doing the equivelent, ever considered 
thats why Flash is overtaking director?  (Although that said I'd use 
Director in it's current form over flash in most projects anyway, 
ActiveX objects are important to me [webbrowser?])

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Re: LDM's and TELL is NOT obsolete whatever MM says

[Rob Romanek]

The problem you raise is not an issue of tell being obsolete or not but 
strickly the problem of mouseEnter/Within/Leave targeting out of scope. 
Basically I find I do not use tell any more in DMX04 the new DOM renders 
it not essential. That does not mean that it won't work anymore (there are 
other lingo commands which are considered obsolete and still work) But for 
what you are doing I would restructure your code as follows

--original code
Property arrow, icon
on mouseEnter me
  tell the stage
tell channel("Navigation").sprite
  icon = sprite(me.spriteNum)
  arrow = channel("Highlight").sprite
end tell
  end tell
end
--new structure
Property arrow, icon
on mouseEnter me
  _player.activeWindow.movie.channel("navigation").sprite.movie.call(#mEnter, 
me)
end

on mEnter me
  icon = sprite(me.spriteNum)
  arrow = channel("Highlight").sprite
end
Now that may seem more convoluted to some but personally I like the way it 
targets the proper scope and then allows me to write my code in a standard 
way without the nested tell statements.

Both ways work. And yes I wish they had fixed the enter/within/leave 
problem too.

hth,
Rob
On Mon, 13 Sep 2004 11:11:38 +0100, Evil Kosh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 
wrote:

Hi guys,
okay, I'd just like to quash this right here and right now, "tell" is
NOT obsolete
MM says in the Director manual that tell is apparently now obsolete and
you dont need to use it anymore, except when of course you have to use
it and perhaps MM should come forward and explain why I had to use tell
in order to get my project to work, tell obsolete? nah, I dont think so.
I got a director movie, which I use as a LDM within my main movie,
within the LDM movie I've got a mouseEnter, Within and Leave events, I
put some code in there, like below (I'll top post this code, so you can
read this, THEN read the code):
as you can see in my code, I've commented out all the tell commands,
WITHOUT them, none of this code works, what happens, is that
me.spriteNum is 2, which is NOT a sprite on the (main movies, but is
within the LDM)stage, so it doesnt do ANYTHING, on the other icon I
dropped this behaviour onto, it's spriteNum is 3, which happens to
coincide with a bitmap of 810x610, but when I highlight the icon within
the LDM, it highlights sprite(3) from the main movie! not the LDM.
so I get a highlight (which is what the script does) over the sprite(3)
within the main movie, as opposed to sprite(3) within the LDM,
marvellous!  The Hack is to get the LDM to tell the stage, to tell the
LDM what to do, what a hack.
Version 10+ of director and they havent got something like this working
yet, people have only been requesting (and subsequently ignored for the
most part) for the last 5+ years..
So remember people, whatever MM says, TELL IS NOT OBSOLETE!!!
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Re: Collating multiple returns from sendAllSprites

[Rob Romanek]

Try the old pass a list reference trick
-- calling routine
resultList = [ 0 ]
sendAllSprites(#GetCheckboxValues, "myCheckboxGroupID", resultList)
put resultList[1]
-- inside the checkbox behaviour
property pThisGroupID -- unique ID for this checkbox group
property pSelected -- boolean for checked state
property pMyValue -- value of this checkbox
on GetCheckboxValues me, groupID, resultList
 if groupID = pThisGroupID and pSelected then resultList[1] = 
resultList[1] + pMyValue
end

hth,
Rob
On Tue, 24 Aug 2004 16:58:38 +0100, Ross Clutterbuck 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The problem is though is that the return value for, say, checkbox #2 will
overwrite the value of checkbox #1 before i can collate all results to 
total
them up, and given my post-injury fatigue my brain has gone dead on how 
to
get around it lol.

Rough pseudocode of what I was going to do:
-- calling routine
result = sendAllSprites(#GetCheckboxValues, "myCheckboxGroupID")
-- inside the checkbox behaviour
property pThisGroupID -- unique ID for this checkbox group
property pSelected -- boolean for checked state
property pMyValue -- value of this checkbox
on GetCheckboxValues me, groupID
if groupID = pThisGroupID and pSelected then return pMyValue
end
So as you can see, the variable "result" will be overwritten with each
message in response to sendAllSprites.
Any ideas?
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Re: Sprite alpha?

[Rob Romanek]

Did you check if  your placeholder the sprites are colourized (in the pi)?
-Rob
On Thu, 19 Aug 2004 15:22:30 -0400, Kerry Thompson 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

They should be a nice grey color, with a drop-shadow. Instead, the
colors are all over the place--grey, lime green, lemon yellow, but with
drop shadows.
The member is 32-bit, with an alpha channel. The sprites have a holder
member, a zero-pixel bitmap, 32-bit. All have "use alpha" checked. There
is nothing behind the sprites except the stage.
Any ideas what's going on?

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Re: Setting vector colors

[Rob Romanek]

Hi Kerry,
When I want to change the color of a sprite I use sprite(x).color = rgb 
(xx, xx, xx)

And I don't have any problems. That said I just tried your .foreColor 
approach on a vector graphic and saw its colour change, I didn't do all 
your dynamic stuff just put it on the score, ran the movie and changed the 
forecolor in the message window.

I just saw Buzz's reply I guess the question is are  you setting the color 
of the vector graphic itself or colorizing the sprite, which is what I got 
out of your code sample.

-Rob
On Wed, 18 Aug 2004 16:15:54 -0400, Kerry Thompson 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

I'm trying to set the color of a vector graphic at runtime. I need to
give it an rgb value, but it seems to only want to take palette colors.
Here's my code:
  channelColorList = [160104100, 192138100, 189180112, 135162111,
112147110, 101155153, 98134145, 95113146, 127104147, 131095122]
(in a loop:)
  channelMember.rect = channelRect
  channelSprite = pSpriteManager.mAllocateChannel()
  sprite(channelSprite).member = channelMember
  sprite(channelSprite).rect = channelMember.rect
  sprite(channelSprite).loc = point(channelLeft, channelTop)
  sprite(channelSprite).rect = rect(channelLeft, channelTop, channelLeft
+ channelRect.right, channelTop + channelRect.bottom)
  sprite(channelSprite).ink = 0
  sprite(channelSprite).foreColor = channelColorList[i]
channelMember is the vector graphic. I've tried it using
RGB("#YADAYADA"), and that doesn't work any better. The forecolor always
ends up 108, it seems.
What do I do to set the color?


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Re: check for lingo list index existence

[Rob Romanek]

Hi Tim,
Recursion is the answer to this. Here is a sample of how this works.
--movie handler
on nestedListRetrieval aList, aPath
  c = aList.count
  if aPath[1] > c then return void
  tValue = aList[aPath[1]]
  if aPath.count > 1 then
aPath.deleteAt(1)
tResult = nestedListRetrieval(tValue, aPath)
return tResult
  else
return tValue
  end if
end
--in the message window
tList = [[[1,2],[3,4],[5,6]],[[7,8],[9,0]]]
put tList[1][3][2]
--6
put nestedListRetrieval(tList, [1,3,2])
--6
tList = [[[1,2],[3,4],[5,6]],[[7,8],[9,0]]]
put tList[1][4][2]
--index out of range
put nestedListRetrieval(tList, [1,4,2])
--
You can modify this and make it more sophisticated, like returning 
extactly where in the path it chocked, but at the very least you should 
add some error checking before you drill down at level to make sure you 
are indeed passing a list.

hth,
Rob
On Wed, 18 Aug 2004 10:36:58 +0100, Tim Welford <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi,
I am using the XMLParser Xtra within a director 8.5 movie, and I'm
outputting the parsed XML to a lingo list with the makeList command.
This produces large multi dimensional lists that I have to work with,
it's a pain to bug fix, but that's not the current issue.
Although I will always be 99.9% sure that the xml layout will always be
the same, I would like to check that a specific list element exists
before trying to access it and protect myself against any "index out of
range errors".
The list element I am accessing (for example) may look like this:
theList[1][2][4][2][1][1]
Is there any way I can check that this list element exists, apart from
doing a huge nested if / loop to check the count of each dimension
before moving onto the next dimension if the count is >= the element I
want?  Something like "if varExists(theList[1][2][4][2][1][1]) then".
A nested if would be fine for 1 or 2 accesses, but I need to access
potentially hundreds of elements.


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Re: AW: propsave Xtra and images

[Rob Romanek]

Hey Michael,
I've never tried #image so I can't comment on that. Have you tried #media 
or #picture?

From PIMZ webpage:
-
Which datatypes are supported?
   #void
   #integer
   #symbol
   #string
   #picture
   #float
   #list
   #point
   #rect
   #propList
   #member
   #castLib
   #sprite
   #soundSprite
   #color
   #date
   #media*
* See "What does it NOT do paragraph" for additional info.>> You could use 
the ProgressCopy Xtra from www.updatestage.com
 ---

I don't see image in there.
hth,
Rob
ProgressCopy is not exactky what I am looking for. propsave would be
perfect, if it worked. There must be some people out there who have
successfully saved lists containing images among other media types.
I would be very grateful if some of them let me know how they made it!
Thanks anyway
Michael
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Re: window masks on the stage

[Rob Romanek]

Are you using MX04?
I haven't tried this but I believe in MXO4 you can mask the stage (for 
sure on earlier versions you can not)

Rob
On Tue, 3 Aug 2004 16:49:35 +0100, Julian Weaver <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Do window masks only work on miaws?
I'm using:
 window("stage").appearanceOptions.mask = member("somemember",2)
it has no effect on the exe.
and when i try to switch it to another mask, the exe crashes.
all masks are 1 bit.
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Re: Hyperlinks in LDM and stage bleed through

[Rob Romanek]

Hey Geoff,
A couple things. First if you set a cursor in an LDM is actually does 
change it but as soon as the mouse moves the stage takes over and sets the 
cursor to its preferred setting. So most of the time you will not see the 
change or see it as a quick flash. The way around this is to target the 
stage with all your cursor changes. Which version of director are you 
using? If pre-MX04 then use

tell the stage to cursor 280
in MX04
_player.activeWindow.movie.cursor(280)
As far as the hypertext bleeding stuff can you post some sample files 
someplace. If you do I'll have quick look and see if I can come up with a 
work-around.

later,
Rob
On Mon, 26 Jul 2004 11:28:27 -0400, Baker, Geoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 
wrote:

Situation:
Text member on stage with a hyperlink which opens an LDM with a hyperlink
text member.
Once the LDM is overtop of the stage text member, the stage's hyperlink
bleed's through the LDM (shows the hand cursor)AND the LDM hyperlink 
fails
to show the bloody cursor.

The relevant code:
on mouseWithin me
-- find if word pointed to is part of a link
-- get word number
tWord = pSprite.pointToWord(the mouseLoc)
-- Kick out if invalid number
if tWord < 1 then exit
-- get hyperlink
tLink = pSprite.member.word[ tWord ].hyperlink
-- Kick out if not a link
if tLink = "" then
  -- Set to pointer
  if pSprite.cursor <> 0 then
pSprite.cursor = 0
  end if
  exit
end if
-- Set to finger cursor
if pSprite.cursor <> 280 then
  pSprite.cursor = 280
end if
end
My goal is to have both text members play nice and show the finger cursor
when over a valid hyperlink and not get confused as to which hyperlink 
has
focus. Note that the actual hyperlinks work just fine. It's the cursor's
that are not behaving.

In the LDM I've tried putting a dontpassevent in the background graphic 
for
mouseEnter, leave, within etc.

Does anyone have the mojo workaround in order to make hyperlinks work in
LDM's?
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Re: MIAWs: close, forget....and VOID? (going OT)

[Rob Romanek]

19/09/2003 7:22:31 PM, Jakob Hede Madsen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>You make me feel missed... you do all me miss right?  ;-)
>I guess at least some of you must have noticed my 'absence'.
>

>I have just been on a two day 'camp trip'(or whatever it's called) 
>with the whole "informatics" line of students, some 80 guys, mostly 
>bland 19 year olds, almost straight out of high-school.
>I am 37, and when I looked around and wondered too much, the 
>situation just seemed almost surreal.

Hey Jacob,

Just wanted to thank you for you insightful posts over the years.

Good luck with your future endeavors and hopefully you'll pop in every now and 
then. You are a brave man to go back and hang around with a bunch of 19 year 
olds :-)

Rob



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Re: attaching behaviors at runtime

[Rob Romanek]

Okay I re-read your and Kristian's posts.

There should be no problem with the me reference if you add code such as

put me

you will see that a proper reference to me is output 

The problem stems from the fact that both of you were creating a new script 
instance with the new() command. Behaviours work in such a way that when they 
are dropped on a sprite and then are instantiated the automatically create a 
property called spriteNum and assign the current sprite number to it. However 
when you call the new() event on the script no such automation occurs. You can 
get around this by forceably creating a the spriteNum property after call the new()

x = script("whatever").new()
x[#spriteNum] = theNumber

Craig in my example the spriteNum is hard coded because it is communicating to 
another sprite, I could have used sendAllSprites and it would have worked. Also 
all the instances in the scriptInstanceList will have their spriteNum defined since 
they were instantiated under regular circumstances so if in the alert line you add

me.spriteNum

you'll see that the correct reference shows up. No problems at all. If you explore 
this in the future and still have problems send me a code sample I know I can 
make it work.

hth,

Rob




11/09/2003 11:42:12 AM, "Craig Taylor" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>Hey Rob,
>
>> on mouseDown me
>>   pCounter = pCounter + 1
>>   if pCounter mod 2 then
>> pSL = sprite(1).scriptInstanceList
>> sprite(1).setNum(random(100))
>> sprite(1).scriptInstanceList = []
>>   else
>> sprite(1).scriptInstanceList = pSL
>>   end if
>> end
>>
>
>Had  a similar sample that also worked fine, aong as you hard-coded the
>spriteNum.  The problem seems to arise if you use "me" to reference the
>sprite from where you are executing the code.  It simply fails to recognize
>that sprite.  I just sent a response back to Kristian, as such.  In other
>words, if you hardcode the spriteNum or even use sprite(the
>currentSpriteNum) as an alternative, it works fine, as long as you don't
>reference the object??
>
>Weird...




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Re: attaching behaviors at runtime

[Rob Romanek]

Hi Craig,

I just saw this thread and was surprised you had problems with the 
scriptInstanceList. I was sure I'd played this in the past so I just set up a little 
test 
movie and it seems to work for me.

I put this on a sprite in channel 1

property pNum

on mouseDown me
  alert pNum & me
end

on setNum me, aNum
  pNum = aNum
end

on getPropertyDescriptionList me
  pdl = [:]
  
  pdl[#pNum] = [#comment : "number", #default:0, #format:#integer]
  
  return pdl
end

then on another sprite I put

property pCounter
property pSL

on mouseDown me
  pCounter = pCounter + 1
  if pCounter mod 2 then
pSL = sprite(1).scriptInstanceList
sprite(1).setNum(random(100))
sprite(1).scriptInstanceList = []
  else
sprite(1).scriptInstanceList = pSL
  end if
end

click on sprite 1 to get it to alert the info
click on the other sprite once to remove the behaviour on sprite(1), but first it 
randomly defines a new value for the pNum property of sprite(1)

click on sprite 1, no alert
click on the other sprite to restore the functionality of sprite 1
click on sprite 1 and see functionality restored with a new value written to pNum.

hth,

Rob

10/09/2003 9:18:27 PM, "Craig Taylor" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>> Craig,
>>
>> Yes, I would use a completely different approach than mucking with
>> the scriptInstanceList.  If you have written your own behavior that
>> handles clicking on each answer, and you have a way of talking to all
>> answer sprites, then here's what I would do.
>>
>> In the answer behavior, add a property called something like,
>> pAvailable.  When the user can answer the question, pAvailable should
>> be set to TRUE.  When the user selects one answer, you should call a
>> handler in the behavior attached to all answers that sets pAvailable
>> to FALSE
>
>Irv,
>
>I originally considered using a flag to turn user interaction on and off,
>but unfortunately, given the rest of the functions (that I haven't
>outlined), it does get a little messy.  Having said that, I am going to
>rewrite it in a very similar manner to what you proposed.  Thanks for the
>input.
>
>Couple of things to note about why using the scriptInstanceList didn't work
>for me.  Just curious if anyone has encountered similar findings.
>
>When I created a script as such:
>script1 = script("myScript").new("right","wrong")
>sprite(x).scriptInstanceList.add(script1)
>
>It seemed to ignore the parameters that I fed it.  When it ripped through
>the code AFTER clearing the scriptInstanceList and then reapplying
>behaviours, it couldn't find these values anymore.  (They were initiated
>with a getPropertyDescriptionList on the original behaviour).
>
>Also, I had a rollover behaviour that was based on:
>sprite(me.spriteNum).member =  x
>
>Again, once I stripped behaviours from the sprite and then reapplied them, I
>got an error on mouseEnter.  If I changed the code to this:
>sprite(the currentSpriteNum).member =  x
>
>It worked!  Unfortunately, too many "me" references down the line to make
>this a feasible fix.  Is it just getting confused between the initial
>instance of the behaviour and the reapplied instance??  Got me.  Thoughts?
>
>Thanks also to Andrée and Howdy for their responses.  And Irv, kudos on the
>e-book.  Great OOP reference!
>

>




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Re: OT: Adios

[Rob Romanek]

11/08/2003 9:16:50 AM, Tab Julius <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>I agree, it's clear the market is dramatically reduced.  Just curious, 
>compared to a couple of years ago, where do people think it is?  30% of 
>what it was?  10%?  60%?  Where do you think it will be in two years?
>
>Specifically the Director/Lingo market.  It's clear the Flash market is 
>much stronger.
>

It's funny but my contracts seem to have gone opposite the market. For the 3 
years prior to this one I was doing mostly net work... a bunch of e-
commerce/product configurators with a tool called intershop and coldfusion and 
html stuff. A few cds and a bit of flash work thrown in here and there. The owner of 
the shop got nervous with the downturn in the market and changed directions (let's 
do banner ads instead, his primary company was an ad agency and he never 
really understood what we were doing) Anyway I've done nothing but director work 
this year. A big sales kiosk/ sales closing application and a bunch of cd and 
DVD-Roms. Currently the DVD-Rom market seems to be hot as far as learning 
tools for sales rep who are on the road all the time. Most of the IT departments I've 
worked with don't have their reps on the latest and greatest tech, they prefer a 
conservative tried and true approach so Flash MX is useless to me as far as 
internet stuff. That and for most of these reps there is no guarentee they'll get 
more than 56 k dial-up connnection while on the road and since most of the 
training tools have a lot of video CD/DVD-ROM is the answer (and flash can't 
handle the amount of video so that and other reasons leave me with Director). I 
think I can rely on that market for the next couple years, I'll see... I may have to 
do 
more flash work again then but for now I'm extremely happy to be back in the 
director world!!

Rob



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Re: List as behavior property converted to string-help

[Rob Romanek]

Hi Geoff,

Unfortunately simply setting the format to #list is not going to work. The gpdl 
doesn't really accept that and as you've discovered sets the input to be a string.

You can work around this however by adding the following line to your beginsprite 
handler

pListOfSubMenusToCheck = value(pListOfSubMenusToCheck)

The value command will turn a properly structured string into a list, amoung other 
things. There is a good article on the value command at www.director-online.com, 
I think Zac Belado wrote it.

-hth

Rob

12/08/2003 10:15:06 AM, "Baker, Geoff" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>I'm having a problem with a behavior I wrote. Seems for some reason Director
>in "sometimes" converting my list to a string. I have not been able to track
>down why.
>
>I set pListOfSubMenusToCheck in the behavior to a list like
>["item1","item2"] and at run time Director see's it as "["item1","item2"]".
>You'll not that the format of the property is set to #list. 





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Re: OT: Adios

[Rob Romanek]

Hey Evan,

I have to say that I've been kind of lucky in my freelance career as a developer. I've 
never had to market myself tons I manage to hook up with agencies and get a 
regular flow of work from them. So I don't do any selling of "the product" to the 
ultimate client, that is done through the agency I'm working with (these are usually 
small shops of 5 - 10 people) And basically they sell it as an end product not a 
"director" app or a "flash" app. The ultimate client usually justs asks for some kind 
of tool, training, kiosk whatever the agency I work with gives me the specs on 
there machines and says what can you put together for us that will work and at a 
reasonable cost under a tight timeline (I work fastest and best in director so that is 
usually my solution... and it does everything they need)

The only project recently where I had to "argue" for Director over Flash was a 
"multimedia" newsletter that was to be sent out as an e-mail attachment to the 
sales force. And basically it was a no brainer because the sales force did not 
have the flash MX player on their machines. They did have shockwave 8 and QT 5 
and since the newsletter had 2 minutes of video and had to come in under 1.2 mb 
when zipped a shocked projector built in director was able to meet all the criteria 
where FMX did not. I built it handed it over to their IT dept to test for 
compatibility 
and that was it.

Not sure if that offers any insight or its just babble on my end :-)

Rob

11/08/2003 1:02:02 PM, Evan Adelman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>Ok, so this brings up a question in my head: for all you successful full 
>time Director dev's, are you finding Director work through current 
>relationships, or do you have a different strategy to open new markets? 
>Do you bring Director to the table through pre-built projects ("We sell 
>Kiosk applications." or "We sell the majestic music video mixer 2000, 
>build with Director" or Rob's "Presentations for sales reps.") or 
>through custom engagements? And Rob, are you out there promoting your 
>example as a product vs. a custom solution from scratch? Care to share?
>
>Evan





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Re: scriptInstanceList

[Rob Romanek]

25/06/2003 8:59:02 AM, Quixadá <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>while we´re on this subject, what handler should be executed when an 
>instance of a script is added to a sprite scriptinstancelist? the on 
>beginsprite doesn´t seem to be executed, so that´s why i have to send 
>sprites messages. and even those seem not work sometimes.
>q
>

Hey Quixada,

Glad you got your scriptInstance issue worked out.

Below is the script I use for dynamic sprite creation.
It allows me to create a sprite, assign properties like member, ink etc and as 
many behaviours as I want, all in one call.

Also it is designed to use "standard" behaviour structure, that is you don't have to 
do anything special to behaviours you want to attach to dynamic sprites. You'll see 
that it forceably calls the beginSprite handler to make sure the scripts are properly 
initialized. Also there is code to deal with the endSprite handler.

If you want to see it in action along with a demonstration of the pitfalls of dynamic 
sprites (this is what Kerry mentioned earlier) (and a crude partial work around for 
the problem) then check out

http://www.manibus.com/testzone/dynamicSprite/dynaSprite.dir

hth

Rob

PS if working with dynamic sprites the only real solution for them not interfering 
with score authored sprites is to dedicate a range of channels for them and never 
put score authored sprites in those channels

--dynamic sprite generation
--written by Rob Romanek, [EMAIL PROTECTED]

on makeSprite aNum, aProps, aBhvrs
  --check for valid aNum, the sprite number
  if not(integerP(aNum)) then return
  if aNum<1 and aNum>the lastchannel then return
  
  me = script("dynamicSprite")
  
  puppetSprite aNum, 1
  
  --aProps list passed in as
  defaultProps = [\
#member:member(-1),\
#loc: point(0,0),\
#ink: 0,\
#blend: 100,\
#color: rgb(0,0,0),\
#backColor: 0\
]
  
  --change default props to those passed in
  c=defaultProps.count
  repeat with i = 1 to c
tProp = defaultProps.getPropAt(i)
tValue = aProps[tProp]
if not(voidP(tValue)) then 
  aProps.deleteProp(tProp)
  defaultProps[i] = tValue
end if 
  end repeat
  
  --add additional props
  c = aProps.count
  repeat with i = 1 to c
tProp = aProps.getPropAt(i)
tValue = aProps[i]
defaultProps[tProp]=tValue
  end repeat
  
  --apply them to the sprite
  c = defaultProps.count
  repeat with i = 1 to c
tProp = defaultProps.getPropAt(i)
tValue = defaultProps[i]
case tProp of
  #member: sprite(aNum).member = tValue
  #loc: sprite(aNum).loc = tValue
  #ink: sprite(aNum).ink = tValue
  #blend: sprite(aNum).blend = tValue
  #color: sprite(aNum).color = tValue
  #backColor: sprite(aNum).backColor = tValue
  #rect: sprite(aNum).rect = tValue
  #rotation: sprite(aNum).rotation = tValue
  otherwise
do "sprite(" & aNum & ")." & tProp & "=" & tValue
end case  
  end repeat
  
  if voidP(aBhvrs) then return
  
  sprite(aNum).scriptInstanceList = [me.new()]
  
  c = aBhvrs.count
  repeat with i = 1 to c
tProp = aBhvrs.getPropAt(i)
tValue = aBhvrs[i]
sprite(aNum).scriptInstanceList.add(script(tProp).new())
tvc = tValue.count
if tvc then
  si = sprite(aNum).scriptInstanceList.count
  repeat with j = 1 to tvc
tProp2 = tValue.getPropAt(j)
tValue2 = tValue[j]
sprite(aNum).scriptInstanceList[si][tProp2]=tValue2
  end repeat
end if
  end repeat
  
  sendSprite(aNum, #beginSprite) 
end 


on endDynamicSprite me
  if voidP(me) then return
  if not(objectP(me)) then return
  
  sprite(me.spriteNum).memberNum = -1
  sendSprite(me.spriteNum, #endSprite)

  sprite(me.spriteNum).puppet = 0
  
  sprite(me.spriteNum).scriptInstanceList = []
end



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Re: scriptInstanceList

[Rob Romanek]

Hi,

Kerry suggested one possibility but I think I'm reading your problem a little 
differently. You have a bunch of sprites lets say 1 to 10 which are all created on 
the fly sending a message to one of them affects them all right? 

Kerry I think the problem you are describing is if you create a sprite on the fly in 
channel 2 frame 5, lets say, and then jump to fram 500 where a score created 
sprite exists, the script instancelist applied in frame 5 mucks up the score one in 
frame 500. Let me know if I'm wrong.

Anyway I think the problem Quixada is having stems from how the behaviours are 
attached to the sprite on the fly. Sounds to me like each sprite is not getting a 
unique instance of the behaviour but rather pointers to the same instance.

Quixada if you can post some of your code you use to attach the behaviours that 
may help us solve the problem.

-Rob

24/06/2003 3:42:56 PM, Quixadá <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>hi, folks

>that´s ok, it works. the problem comes when i try to change a parameter 
>inside that script in only a specific sprite, because all the sprites have 
>their parameters changed.
>
>but same results.
>i think i don´t need to put the entire behaviors here, because it´s all 
>about how on-the-fly scripts deal with sendsprite messages.
>
>win xp, d 8.5.1
>
>thanks,
>q




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Re: creating a new sprite using lingo

[Rob Romanek]

Hi Diego,

If you open up director then use the open command to open a new movie, in the 
dialog box the comes up select "internet" then paste this url in:

http://www.manibus.com/testzone/dynamicSprite/dynaSprite.dir

this is a movie that demonstrates creating sprites out of nowhere. It is possible, 
and usable. The biggest problem with this approach is if you try to dynamically 
apply behaviours to your dynamic sprites you completely mess up the behaviours 
for all sprites in the channel, throughout your movie (this sample shows a crude 
work around that still is not completely satifactory). This problem can be avoided 
by deciding on channels to use for dynamic sprites and sticking to them. As long 
as you are content with that then go ahead and create dynamic sprites otherwise 
populate channels with dummy members and use those instead.

hth,

Rob


20/06/2003 8:57:58 PM, "Diego Landro" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>Thanks a lot for the info you provided, but what i was trying to do was
>creating a sprite out of nowhere (meaning no placeholder on the stage) and
>from the info you provided i deduce that{s not possible if there are no
>placeholders where my sprites would be. is this correct, or jus by ading a
>puppetsprite line to my code  i will be able to acrually see the sprites i
>assigned members to but which weren{t originally on stage (not even
>represented by placeholders)?




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Re: AW: AW: tell when importFileInto is done?

[Rob Romanek]

Hi Michael,

Sorry I misunderstood. Try this instead...

Create your dummy cast members as 1 pixel bitmaps (you need some kind of 
image in there because this will be making use of the "media" property, I only say 
this cause you can create a dummy member simply by opening a paint window 
giving it a name and then closing again, but this approach creates a member that 
has no media property)

global gMembersToResetList

on prepareMovie
gMemberMembersToResetList = [theMember : theMember.media,
anothermember: anothermember.media]
end

on stopMovie
c = gMembersToResetList.count
repeat with i = 1 to c
theMem = gMembersToResetList.getPropAt(i)
theMedia = gMembersToResetList[i]
theMem.media = theMedia 
end repeat
end

of course if they are all basically using the same media (1 pixel bitmap) then there 
is no reason to store multiple copies of the same info in a prop list but I'll let you 
work that out :-)

hth,

Rob

16/06/2003 2:40:14 PM, "Michael von Aichberger" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 
wrote:

>Hi Rob,
>
>I don't want to reset the member to any file name, but to "no" filename.
>Because, when the movie starts, this member should not be externally linked
>at all.
>
>So what do you do suggest for how to reset in this case?
>



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Re: AW: tell when importFileInto is done?

[Rob Romanek]

Hey Michael,

Why don't you use a little script to do that resetting for you. That way you don't 
have to go back to a version before... off the top of my head something like this 
should work

global gMembersToResetList

on prepareMovie
gMemberMembersToResetList = [theMember : theFileName, 
anothermember: anotherFileName]
end

on stopMovie
c = gMembersToResetList.count
repeat with i = 1 to c
theMem = gMembersToResetList.getPropAt(i)
theFile = gMembersToResetList[i]
theMem.fileName = theFile
end repeat
end

-Rob


>Well I solved that by having two tiny dummy cast members that are embedded.
>When I do a run through in authoring I just have to go back to the version
>before, otherwise my dummies are replaced by externally linked cast members
>...
>
>Not so much a problem, but I THOUGHT importFileInto was more elegant ..
>
>Thanks anyway
>
>Michael





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Re: tell when importFileInto is done?

[Rob Romanek]

That should have read:

...I  have NOT tested the two...


16/06/2003 10:42:23 AM, Rob Romanek <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I have tested the two for speed but my gut tells 
>me that swapping the filename will be faster... don't ask me why just a feeling.
>
>Rob




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Re: tell when importFileInto is done?

[Rob Romanek]

Hi Michael,

Check out:

member(whichCastMember).loaded

I'm curious though why are you using importFileInto instead of simply changing the 
filename of a linked cast member? I have tested the two for speed but my gut tells 
me that swapping the filename will be faster... don't ask me why just a feeling.

Rob


16/06/2003 9:27:12 AM, "Michael von Aichberger" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 
wrote:

>Hi list!
>
>For a simple slide show application I am using very large images (4096 x
>768).
>
>I am using two cast members. When cast member A is displaying a slide, I use
>importFileInto to import the next slide into cast member B. And vice versa.
>
>My problem: Even though the images are on the local hard disk, it
>importFileInto takes some time. I need the execution of the next "step
>forward" to wait for the next slide to be available.
>
>Is there a way to tell when importFileInto is done?
>
>I looked into preloadnetthing, but I am not downloading from the internet.
>
>Any solution?
>




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Re: text

[Rob Romanek]

Hi Liz

Check out the scrollTop property of text members

-hth

Rob

12/06/2003 10:53:36 AM, Liz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I have some scrollable text in a window and would like to be able to
>start the text half way through the text field.  What I am actually
>trying to do is to place a hyperlink in the top part of the text and
>have it jump down to another location further down in the text.  
>
>Any idea how I can do this in lingo?
>
>Thanks
>Liz




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Re: RE: easing equations

[Rob Romanek]

Even easier...

open director, select the open command, hit the internet button on the lower right, 
put in the url for the dir, wait a bit... and there you have it open in director just 
save 
to your hard drive

-Rob

11/06/2003 12:19:35 PM, Jorge Pena <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>Kerry,
>
>I had the same problem and this is how I solved it: In dreamweaver or
>any other HTML program create a link that points to Evan's URL... then
>open that file in your browser, right click on the link and select save
>as... should pop open the file dialog.
>
>HTH
>
>Jorge
>
>-Original Message-
>
>Hey, Evan, that's really cool. Nice job.
>
>I can't get at the source, though--going to the .dir file launches the
>Shockwave animation. I'd love to have the source--I'm sure a lot of us
>would. What's the procedure to dl it?
>
>Cordially,




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Re: RE: Property list value

[Rob Romanek]

Or you could use this syntax

yourList[x]

-Rob

08/06/2003 9:02:34 PM, "Kerry Thompson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>> I can't figure out how to access a property list value using list 
>> number instead of using property name.
>
>yourList.getAt(x)
>
>Cordially,
>
>Kerry Thompson
>




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Re: film loop speed - direction controlled with lingo?

[Rob Romanek]

Hi Krista,

I have code for controlling a filmloop, backward, forward, fast forward, fast rewind. 
I just need to dig it up.

It is based on tell sprite but there is some stuff you need to add within the filmloop 
as well...

I'll post it once I find it again.

Rob

06/06/2003 7:19:09 PM, krista <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>Hello,
>thanks for all the suggestions - unfortunately my film loop plays while
>there are other items on the score that need to keep their current tempo..
>I'm thinking my best bet would be to either convert all film loops to
>digital video - and use the movie rate, or use linked dir files and use
>lingo to control those...
>though i'll see what might be done with tell sprite..
>
>thanks again,
>krista
>
>
>> 
>>> I was just thinking the same. But what if you tried tell sprite go
>>> the frame - 1 on exitFrame? Sounds crazy, but you never know. Haven't
>>> played with tell sprite much to know any better.
>> 
>> It just might work. I use tell sprite to see when a film loop is
>> finished playing.
>> 
>> It's worth a try. What's the worst that can happen? Reformat your hard
>> drive, probably, but you've got backups ^_^




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Re: UDF file structure PC and Mac share an Xtras folder?

[Rob Romanek]

Hi Nik,

I've haven't worked with UDF yet but on all my CD-ROM projects I would use one 
xtras folder that had 2 sub folders one labelled PC and the other Mac. You can 
have as many sub folders as you want as long as they are in the xtras folder the 
projector will find all your xtras.

Rob

01/04/2003 2:38:08 PM, nik crosina <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>Hi List,
>
>I've got an interesting problem:
>
>We are burning a DVD ROM and these disks use the UDF file structure 
(asopposed to ISO or HFS, ot else) and if a Mac has the UDF extension installed 
which most macs do, it can read it. Problem is, if I want to make that 
crossplatform with both projectors (mac / pc) at rootlevel for convenience,then I 
have to put all Xtras into one Xtas folder (as I can't have 2 folders with the same 
name and how would the OSs distinguish anyways).
>
>Is that possible?




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Re: cast size

[Rob Romanek]

While you are authoring the jpg compression is not applied but when you are 
ready to roll-out apply shockwave compression to the cast (the amount of 
compression can be controlled on a per cast member basis or you can apply a 
global setting). You'll see your cast size come back down to something 
manageable.

hth,

Rob

11/03/2003 10:49:21 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

>
>Well, I've got a folder of jpgs that is 18 megs.   Once I import into an 
>external cast, the damn thing bloats to 203 megs - what the hell?  I don't 
>recall ever having a problem like this before?
>
>
>But I'm really curious why my cast bloated up so bad.
>





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Re: embedded director movies

[Rob Romanek]

21/02/2003 3:35:20 PM, "fluxus" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>Well, that's at least some progress, because in versions prior to MX
>mouseEnter wouldn't work at all in LDMs, as far as I know.

Yes it did, the problem has always been movie scope. LDMs 
mouseEnter/leave/within always target the stage and this causes the problems.

Read my article on doug,

http://www.director-online.com/accessArticle.cfm?id=439

the article is getting old but most of it holds true. I discuss the mouseEnter 
problem and the sample movie has code that shows you how to get around this. 
The shortcoming of the code valentin put up is that it will only work if you have only 
one ldm.


Rob


>Here is simple way to fix director's confusion, based on the undocumented
>fact that the tell-command works not only for windows but also for
>LDM-sprites!
>
>1) in a sprite-script attached to the LDM-sprite in the main-dir:
>
>global gLDM
>
>on beginSprite me
>  gLDM=sprite(me.spriteNum)
>end
>
>
>2) in the script inside the LDM:
>
>global gLDM
>
>on mouseEnter me
>  tell the stage to tell gLDM to sprite(10).blend = 50
>end
>
>on mouseLeave me
>  tell the stage to tell gLDM to sprite(10).blend = 100
>end
>
>
>regards,
>valentin
>
>
>> Hello people, i've been trying for the last 3 years to use embbedded
>> movies the right way, no success..
>>
>> The main problem I face is that the scripts I write in the embedded movie
>> that accesss its sprites, tend to mix
>> up everything and endup accessing the main movie.
>>
>> example
>>
>> if I put a script on the embedded movie:
>>
>> on mouseenter me
>> (sprite 10).blend = 50
>> end
>>
>>
>> lets suppose that this script is put on the (sprite 2) of the embedded
>> movie, when the mouse pointer passes
>> over that sprite, the (sprite 10) of the MAIN movie gets its blend level
>> changed, and not the (sprite 10) at the
>> embedded one?!?!?
>>
>> what in the universe make it works like that?? Why not use the same _root
>> and _parent syntax as Flash?
>>
>> and better, whats the syntax to change the blend level of a sprite on the
>> embedded movie?
>>
>> Luiz
>




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Re: LDM and Child Script Objects

[Rob Romanek]

Hi Eric,

What's causing you the trouble is the timeout objects and the prepareFrame. 
Neither of which work properly in LDMs :-(

The timeoutList works just great in the LDM, the objects get created and added to 
the list BUT the objects in the list never seem to be triggered. Only the stage 
timeoutlist gets processed. So is there a work around. Yup, you need to add the 
timeout object to the stages timeoutlist. But if you do that then the child gets 
referenced while the scope in focused in the stage not in the LDM so that childs 
timeout handler would act at the stage level. To get around this set a flag and 
execute the event on an enterframe. This script should do the trick,


property pStartMem
property pFlag

on new me, aNum, aMem
  sprite(aNum).scriptInstanceList.add(me)
  pStartMem = sprite(me.spriteNum).member
  sprite(me.spriteNum).member = aMem
  tell the stage to x = timeout(string(me)).new(500, #aHandler, me)
end

on aHandler me, aTimeoutObj
  aTimeoutObj.forget()
  pFlag = 1
end

on enterFrame me
  if pFlag then
sprite(me.spriteNum).member = pStartMem
sprite(me.spriteNum).scriptInstanceList.deleteOne(me)
  end if
end

As far as prepareframe events they don't get triggered in an LDM when you 
specifically "go" to a frame so a command like "go the frame" renders 
prepareFrame events useless. BUT if the playback head enters the frame by 
simply advancing on its own then the prepareFrame gets called. Don't know why 
this happens but it does so to get prepareFrame called 19 out of 20 times span 
your sprite across 20 frames (say 1 to 20) then on frame 20 say "go to frame 1"

hth,

Rob


08/02/2003 8:20:18 PM, "Eric Greene" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>This works as a movie by itself. The LDM works up to the child changing
>the sprites cast member. After that nothing happens. The sprite stays
>with its changed cast member. Is the timeout's response going somewhere
>else, or do I need to tell the LDM that time is passing by sending it a
>message?
>
>As a side note: Both problem behaviors do not need interaction with the
>mouse handlers after they start. The other behavior, the one I threw
>out, does not use timeOuts, but it does use prepareFrame, enterFrame,
>and ExitFrame. It does not work either as an LDM.
>
>Thanks




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Re: LDM and Child Script Objects

[Rob Romanek]

Hi Eric,

Where do you have the mouseEnter executing? Is it in the LDM if so then that is a 
problem. Unfortunately both mouseEnter and Leave don't respect LDM scope. 
They target the stage with their events instead of keeping within the LDM. This is 
a known issue that will hopefully get fixed some day. It would make life a lot 
easier. In the mean time you will have to flag the enter or leave in the behaviour 
and then during an enterframe test for the flag and execute your code there.

Also another tidbit is that if you don't have a mouseDown or mouseup event 
attached to a sprite somewhere in the current LDM frame then mouse events 
won't get trapped in the LDM, I usually have a persistent dummy sprite around to 
deal with this. So if you start with sprites with no behaviours you'll never be able 
to 
attach anything dynamically that depends on mouse events.

hth,

Rob

08/02/2003 3:06:43 AM, "Eric Greene" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>
>I'm trying to import a Director file by using 'Link to External File',
>but am not having any success. The behavior scripts in the LDM won't
>run. I've made sure 'Enabled Scripts' is on in the property inspector.
>
>The LDM is a Director movie that has two simple Parent Scripts and some
>sprites. When the mouse activates the 'on mouseEnter' or 'on mouseUp'
>handlers, the sprites call new child objects that attach themselves to
>the sprites and de-attach themselves once they are done. Everything
>works fine in the original movie, but when I put it as an LDM in another
>movie the behaviors do not run.
>
>Is it not possible to do this?
>
>
>
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Re: Child objects and the scriptInstanceList

[Rob Romanek]

Hi Eric

Sounds like your sequence of events might be off somewhere. I'm exactly sure 
from your description. But here is something I put together quickly to do what I 
think you want to do.

--testBhvr--
property p1

on new me, a1
  p1 = a1
  return me
end

on mouseDown me
  put "pressing", me
  put p1, me.spriteNum
  sprite(me.spriteNum).scriptInstanceList.deleteOne(me)
end

in the message window call the following

sprite(yourSprite).scriptInstanceList.add(script("testBhvr").new(44))

check the scriptInstanceList, you should see the instance
click on the sprite you should see output in your message window
but because the mouseDown triggers the removal subsequent mousedowns do 
nothng.

HTH,

Rob

PS if you didn't need to pass in variables you don't even need the new event


05/02/2003 7:58:05 AM, "Eric Greene" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>Hi There,
>
>I'm not a real programmer, so forgive me if this is a stupid question.
>I'm trying to create a child behavior that attaches itself to a sprite
>and then de-attaches itself once it's done its job (over a few seconds).
>




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LDM was(Re: ANN: Director MX)

[Rob Romanek]

Alexandre Cop wrote:


Rob,



Would you know if nested director movies get a similar support?


Keep on bugging Macr for this cause they might notice for the
next release.


I've done that since D8 Beta




They've known about it since before then too, I'm sure because with most 
versions the LDM situation has improved slightly. DMX's focus is not a 
rewrite of the core director engine but to improve the authoring 
environment, bring in the Flash compatibility, and port to OSX. All of 
which are major undertakings. I'm hoping to find some time to seriously 
play with the Flash object stuff cause it looks very cool especially to 
open up communication with CF etc. Also the new object inspector and 
changes in the debugger look great. As soon as the dust settles from 
this release they'll be looking forward to the next so hopefully some 
more bugging will result to enhancements to the core engine.



What's the performance like LDM v MIAW?




I haven't worked out any hard numbers but LDM performance is very robust 
once you get them working :-) If I find some time over the next month or 
so I'll try to get some comparisons up of LDMs vs MIAWs vs Flash Sprites.

later,

Rob



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Re: ANN: Director MX

[Rob Romanek]

Alexandre Cop wrote:



Would you know if nested director movies get a similar support?



Keep on bugging Macr for this cause they might notice for the next release.



I have a project where a Director movie has to be displayed in a MIAW,
because if I put it on the stage all the 'off stage' elements are displayed.
As a result, I have to keep my app full screen, which is a bit annoying...




All your "off stage" elements should not be showing up unless you have 
your LDM (linked director movie) sprite set to either 0 width or 0 
height. The sprite will crop the LDM based on width and height for 
everything except 0, also check the LDM member to make sure you have it 
set to crop, if you want cropping or scale if you want scaling.

This will work, I've done it many times. If it isn't and you have a 
small sample movie you can send me off-list, I'll check it for you.

Rob




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

[Rob Romanek]

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


> On Tue, 22 Oct 2002 09:52:18 -0700, Buzz Kettles <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > don't hold your breath on it getting removed
> >
> > I wouldn't bother with wishlist - there's no way your request would
> > get addressed.
>
> Buzz, this strikes me as rather gloomy, especially coming from an
ex-Macromedia guy.
>
> Maybe it's the specific nature of this request that you think would be
taken to be 'unreasonable'.

I took Buzz's statement to be on the nature of the request and not on the
wish list response. Although this idea of more cast flexibility is a fun one
to banter around and may be of more value to some then others I think it
would get pushed way down in the priority list, although that's just my
opinion :-)

I'm just patiently waiting for the next version of Director and hoping that
they are diligently working on all our other wishes, that cast stuff is fun
but as Buzz pointed out there are ways of getting what you want without too
much pain... I'm curious to see what I'll see at the sneak peeks at Devcon
next week...

later,

Rob

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Re: Getting rid of "Internal"?

[Rob Romanek]

Robert Tweed wrote:



"internal" for scripts. Makes sense to start using it for that purpose
instead. Just a pity I can't (a) Rename it, and (b) Stop it opening whenever
you reload the project, although I suppose that gives me the opportunity to
check it's always empty.




Hey Robert,

a) is no problem, just click on the internal cast to make it the active 
window, then use the Property Inspector to change the name.

b)No luck there

Something else that might be useful is if you could reorder the casts 
like you can behaviours attached to a sprite. The internal cast would 
probably remain in the primary position but if you could move it around 
then maybe you could get another cast to open by default...

I'm waiting for full LDM support, Flash MX xtra, navity connectivity to 
cold fusion etc. etc.  before I start asking for this other stuff :-)

-Rob

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Re: Getting rid of "Internal"?

[Rob Romanek]

For anyone else working with LDM's I'll just add that the nice thing 
about having the LDM code in an external library is that  during 
development you can link your parent movie to the same library and edit 
the LDM code, hit recompile, you don't even have to save, and see the 
effects of your changes immediately. I know this is not a nice as being 
able to open and edit both movies at once but until we get that feature 
its a pretty good subsititute, especially for debugging.

As far a ditching the internal library, I find it extremely useful 
especially with LDMs. I keep the internal library exclusively for 
creating temporary cast members on the fly. During development it makes 
it easy to track what is being created when and I can select all and 
delete the members and be sure to start clean at any time

my 2 cents,
Rob

Robert Tweed wrote


in linked casts. It also occured to me that to make LDM's work usefully, I
should put *everything* in external casts, so the same code and assets can
be shared between child and parent movies.

Doing this has certainly cleaned up my movies, but it's left me with a big
ugly "internal" cast that pops up whenever Director starts. It's unused,
badly named, and is just waiting for things to be accidentally dropped into
it. Is there any way to get rid of it? It's certainly well hidden, if it
exists. If not, I'll email this one off to the wishlist.




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Re: removing behaviors from sprites

[Rob Romanek]

Cole Tierney wrote:


> Too bad about the scoreRecording. I may give it try and report my 
> results, just to be sure. I've inherited a bunch of unfinished projects 
> that need some reorganization. Be nice to scoot through the score an 
> clear out all the behaviour refs in one fell swoop.
> 

If all you want to do is clear out all the behaviors attached to all the 
sprites then you don't need score recording. Simply select all the 
sprites and use the property inspector to select the "-" button and 
"clear all behaviours". Maybe I've misunderstood your request and this 
is oversimplifing things.

As far as the discussions earlier regarding adding and removing 
behaviours dynamically, setScriptList() is definitely the ticket. I've 
never tried it during score recording (I see Warren just posted some 
info on that) but you can just run it at any point in your movie and 
walk through the sprites you are interested in and change their 
"behavior makeup" by setting using setScriptList, then when you save the 
movie the new behaviors are saved. Works great!

-Rob


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Re: better to use exitFrame me or stepFrame me?

[Rob Romanek]

Hey Ross,

Check out

  http://www.director-online.com/accessArticle.cfm?id=439

Hey I haven't had time to write a book like Warren so I'll just plug my 
article :-)

Rob


Ross Clutterbuck wrote:

> LDMs?
> 
> My brain is overloaded with acronyms at the moment, so I think this one got
> away...
> 
> Ross


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Re: better to use exitFrame me or stepFrame me?

[Rob Romanek]

Hey Robert,

I was thinking about your workaround for actorLists and stepFrame in 
LDMs. The problem is not that the actorList doesn't work in LDMs but 
rather that stepFrame doesn't get called in LDMs, just like prepareFrame 
doesn't either. The interesting thing is that LDMs actually maintain an 
actorlist separate from the stage.

Your approach of having a global custom actorList means that there will 
be multiple calls to the objects in that list during one "event" cycle.
Lets say you have your script in the stage, an LDM on sprite 1 and an 
LDM on sprite 2. And each of those puts something in the actor list. 
During an "event" cycle, that is the time between movement of the 
playback head, an enterFrame will be called for each of the 3 movies. 
All those movies reference the same global list and will therefore send 
out a stepFrame call 3 times even though you've just stepped into the 
frame once. I'm not sure the effects this will have on performance but 
you may be running handlers, like updating sprite positioning 
unneccessarily.

Another approach may be to make use of the actor list but instead of 
using the stepFrame handler create a custom stepFrame handler in your 
scripts, something like

on enterFrame me
if not(the actorList = []) then
call(#customStep, the actorList)
end if
end

then each item in the actorlist will only be called once and if the 
stepFrame issue gets fixed in some version you can simply do a global 
replace of "customStep" with "stepFrame", remove the above code and 
you're in business.

One issue with all this, there's always something, is if you have 
multiple sprites referencing the same LDM cast member you don't really 
have fully independant instances of the LDMs on the stage. Each sprite 
referencing the same cast member can have independant parts, like their 
sprite locations, colours etc but the share the same castlibraries and 
also actorList. The only way to have truly unique instances of LDMs is 
to have every sprite on stage reference a unique LDM cast member (those 
cast members can all refer to the same external director movie).

I'll stop blathering there before this gets even more confusing :-)


Rob


Robert Tweed wrote:


> (for instance, when dragging an object). However, I have recently decided
> that for reasons of performance and usefulness, to avoid the actorList, and
> create my own custom actorList instead. For instance, you can use the
> following frame script:
> 
> global gSpecialActorList
> 
> on enterFrame me
>   if( ListP( gSpecialActorList ) ) then
> call( #stepFrame, gSpecialActorList )
>   end if
> end
> 
> Then use gSpecialActorList in place of the actorList. Since the actorList
> doesn't work in LDMs, and this solution is more efficient, it makes far more
> sense than using the in-built actorList. 


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Re: better to use exitFrame me or stepFrame me?

[Rob Romanek]

Yeah, I mean't too say enterFrames ARE NOT triggered by updatestage.

Hit that send button too soon. Thanks for pointing this out.

Rob

Buzz Kettles wrote:


> 
> I think you're incorrect Rob -
> (if I understand your description correctly)
> 
> updateStage's DON'T trigger enterFrame, however the DO trigger 
> prepareFrame's
> 
> (which may be the issue that you were thinking of)
> 


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Re: better to use exitFrame me or stepFrame me?

[Rob Romanek]

Robert Tweed wrote:


> (for instance, when dragging an object). However, I have recently decided
> that for reasons of performance and usefulness, to avoid the actorList, and
> create my own custom actorList instead. For instance, you can use the
> following frame script:
> 
> global gSpecialActorList
> 
> on enterFrame me
>   if( ListP( gSpecialActorList ) ) then
> call( #stepFrame, gSpecialActorList )
>   end if
> end
> 
> Then use gSpecialActorList in place of the actorList. Since the actorList
> doesn't work in LDMs, and this solution is more efficient, it makes far more
> sense than using the in-built actorList. You can also do things like add
> some extra code for dynamically removing items from the list (you shouldn't
> modify the actorList in a stepFrame handler). You could use multiple lists,
> and turn them on and off as required. The possibilities are endless.
> 


This is a nice idea, especially because of how it relates to LDMs, my 
favourite unsupported director feature :-)

But, just to point out to anyone interested calling "updateStage" will 
send out a "stepFrame" call to all the objects in the actorList while 
enterFrames are triggered during an updateStage command. This may have 
some concesquences if you do a series of updateStage calls during a 
tight repeat loop, which is probably not a good thing to do anyways, but 
I just thought I'd point this out.

later,

Rob


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Re: help with linked files

[Rob Romanek]

Hey Krista,

Linked director movies (LDM's) do not handle keyboard input :-(

You need to have the main movie trap the keyboard events and then pass 
along commands to the LDM

use something like this as your frame script in your main movie

on exitFrame me
   go the frame
end

on keyDown me
   if the keyCode=124 then
 tell sprite(numberOfSpriteHoldingLDM) to go marker(1)
   end if

   if the keyCode=123 then
 tell sprite(numberOfSpriteHoldingLDM) to go marker(-1)
   end if
end

hth,

Rob

krista wrote:

> hello all - i am not a lingo star - here is my problem any help would be
> greatly appreciated..
> 
> - so here's the thing. If i have a linked dir movie  file inside my main dir
> file and have the scripts enabled - is there anyway to get the keypress in
> the linked file to work? I have added the keypress to the behaviors on the
> timeline instead of them being in a movie script inside the linked file.
> It seems it responds to the wait commands - but ignores the keypresses. This
> is driving me nutty. Any ideas? Basically ,in a perfect world, i need the
> linked file to jump around its timeline independently of the main timeline..
> 
> any ideas? know what it is i am missing here?
> 
> Krista
> 
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> 
> 


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Re: thumbnail grid in image browser

[Rob Romanek]

If you will be showing a fixed number of thumbnails on the screen at any 
given time then this can be accomplished relatively simply using 
allocated sprites for the grid, without worrying about running out of 
channels.

Basically you would do this through a sprite manager object where you 
have each sprite which is a thumbnail holder register itself with the 
manager when it is born. So if you had a 3X4 grid 12 sprites would 
register themselves in the order they appear on the grid. The manager 
then tracks what group of twelve thumnails to present at any given time 
and swaps images accordingly. This can tie nicely into your search 
system because it can dynamically feed a linear list of thumbnails to 
the manager which is uses to know what and how much to display.

I've found this approach to be very fast and quite flexible if I want 
more squares in the grid I just allocate more sprites in the correct 
order have them register themselves and the manager takes care of the rest.

I'm sure the imaging approach would work too but I like the 
"tangibleness" that sprites give me.

hth,

Rob

Charlie Fiskeaux II wrote:

> I'm working on an image browser, so that someone can browse through an
> archive of images and search them via keywords, and I'm trying to decide the
> best way to create the grid of thumbnails.  So far it seems like the best
> solution would be using Imaging Lingo to combine all of the thumbnails and
> their names onto a single large image, but I wanted to see what y'all
> thought.  The grid will have to be scrollable, since only four rows will be
> visible at once, and I want it to not have a physical limit on the number of
> thumbnails it can display (like running out of the 1000 sprite channels).
> Suggestions?  Comments?
> 
> 


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Re: problem with png files....

[Rob Romanek]

To use the alphaThreshold to determine sensitivity to mouse events make 
sure the sprites ink is set to matte.

hth,

Rob

g r i m m w e r k s wrote:

 
> 
> Im' just basically trying to use the png with an alpha as a window -- I've
> fooled with the alphaThreshold but that really doesn¹t do a thing...
> 


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Re: more cursor problems...

[Rob Romanek]

You'd get the same effect with a mouseDown event if you only put a 
mouseDown event on the bottom sprite. The mouseDown would work even 
where the bottom sprite is obscured by the top one. You need to have the 
top sprite trap the event you are interested in so it doesn't leak 
through to the bottom. So in your case you'll need to attach a trapping 
behaviour to the top sprite, something like

on beginSprite me
sprite(me.spriteNum).cursor=-1
end

on mouseDown me
nothing
end

on mouseUp me
nothing
end

on mouse... etc.

g r i m m w e r k s wrote:

> What the hell? I just put 2 shapes on stage  - the same member. One had
> 
> on beginsprite me
> sprite(me.spritenum).cursor = 280
> end
> 
> I put this hidden under the other shape. The cursor changed to the hand even
> though the sprite was obscurred by the top shape.


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Re: Is Director going to be Scrapped?

[Rob Romanek]

... I know this thread will never die :-)

I did have an interesting meeting with a client this morning where they 
were asking me what I knew about the new version of Director, Director 
X, that was coming out. Of course all I could say was what I'd read in 
the postings from Bob and Tom is that yes a new version is under 
development but a release date was unknown at this time not to mention a 
definitive name so I was curious as to why they refered to it as 
Director X. Turns out they had been doing some searching online for 
Director resources and discovered the following:

Director X Inside Macromedia
Author: Scott Wilson
Book & CD-Rom
Not yet available - PreOrder Today
This item has not yet been released. You may order it today, and we'll 
ship it to you when it arrives at our warehouse.

Our Price: $59.95
You could save  $6.00 (10%) with our iREWARDS Program

ISBN: 1401814778
Published: December 2002 | Published by Delmar


this can be found at www.chapters.ca, by doing a search on "macromedia 
director" its about the 10th book listed.

...so sometimes are clients do know more than us ;-)

later,

Rob

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Re: sound problems

[Rob Romanek]

Works for me,

Are you sure you don't have 2 cast members named the same and the first 
one isn't a sound member?

Rob

brian wrote:


> When I went to the dictiopnary and did what it said, i got the sound to
> play, but it did not start on the point i wanted.
> 
> here is what i did:
> 
> sound(1).queue([#member:member("Dope_Nose"),#startTime:1])
> 
> sound(1).play()
> 
> what am i doing wrong?
> 
> 


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Re: sound problems

[Rob Romanek]

Hey Brian,

.currentTime does work. Are you sure there is a sound playing when you 
try to set it cause if the sound has finished playing before you try to 
set it then it is "dumped" out of the sound channel.

I do find however that there is a bit of delay before the newly set 
currentTime kicks in.

Get a nice long sound file open up the watcher window and add this to it
sound(1).currentTime

start your sound playing

sound(1).play(theSoundMember)

and play with the currentTime, you'll see the delay nicely in the 
watcher window as the time jumps around.

What I found to be a fast solution was to reload the sound channel with 
your sound of interest but use the startTime to jump to the time you are 
interested in:

sound(1).play([#member:thesoundMem, #startTime:theMilliseconds])

the response with this is very fast much better than currentTime

hth,

Rob

PS I was able to create a sound channel scrubber with this so I can 
fastforward and rewind sound members just like you can with quickTime.


brian wrote:

> sound question.
> 
> is it possible to set a sound in a sound channel to a specific point?
> 
> i am trying to use current time as such
> 
> sound(1).currentTime = 700
> 
> to no avail.
> 


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Re: constraint to area

[Rob Romanek]

James Newton wrote:


> Hi Rodrigo,
> 
> It sounds as if you are talking about a viewport.  You can do this with a
> Linked Director Movie.  You'll find an example which uses scrollbars at:
> 
> 
> 
> 

Hey James,

It looks like you and I are playing in the same sandbox :-)

I had a quick look at your viewport code, nice stuff. I'm also using a 
similar approach to yours of keeping a property description list tucked 
inside of an LDM and using a generic behaviour to extract it and make 
modifications. I thought I'd pass along I tip to help out with your 
mGetInitializers handlers which extracts a property list from the 
sprite's scriptList. This approach should eliminate all three of your 
failure cases

on mGetInitializers(me, aSpriteNumber, aBehaviorMember) --

   -- This may fail to provide the correct information in three cases:
   -- 1. If two instances of the same behavior are attached to this
   --sprite.
   -- 2. If two different behaviors with the same name are attached to
   --the same sprite, since  is determined from
   --the name of the script.
   -- 3. If another member with the same name as this behavior appears
   --in a lower-numbered castLib slot.
   --
   -- NOTE: This data is collected in this host movie behavior and
   -- passed to the behavior scripts in the Linked Movie.  If the
   -- Linked Movie tried to determine this data for itself, Director
   -- would manage to create the list, but would then crash.
   
   

The code I use is as follows (watch out for line wraps)

on getPropertyDescriptionList me
   if the currentSpriteNum>0 then
 sList=sprite(the currentSpriteNum).scriptList

 --if not(sList=[]) then
 counter=sList.count
 instances=0
 repeat with i = 1 to counter
   if me=sList[i][1].script.validate() then
 iAm=i
 instances=instances+1
   end if
 end repeat
 if instances>1 then
   alert "There are too many instances 
of"&&me&","&&sList[iAm][1]&","&&"attached to sprite"&&the 
currentSpriteNum&". Please ensure only one copy is attached."
   return
 end if

 --iAm will be > 0 if this is not the initial application of the 
behaviour
 if iAm>0 then
   propList=value(sList[iAm][2])
   if propList=0 then
 propList=[:]
   end if
 else
   propList=[:]
 end if

-- at this point I now have a valid propertyList to work with and can 
send it off to the LDM and work with it as needed.

   end if
end

on validate me
   return me
end


Let me know if this works for you or if you find any holes in it.

later,

Rob

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Re: off topic: fonts

[Rob Romanek]

Hi Evan,

What about limiting font usage to embedded fonts. Create an external lib 
of only embedded fonts and tell your developers they can only use fonts 
from that library.

hth

Rob

Evan Adelman wrote:

>how do you folks deal w/ font issues like on mac 
> "Interstate-Bold" and the bolded up "Interstate" on pc being different? 
> 


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Re: Error with Names sprites by James Newton...

[Rob Romanek]

Hey James,

Had a quick look at your article, nice trick on changing script types.

I thought of one more issue that may come up with the code, it has to do 
with using your sprite list to make a call. The code says to make a call use

  call (#handlerName, sprites(#theName))

since sprites handler returns a list of sprites in the form of [(sprite 
1), (sprite 2), etc] then in the behaviours attached to the sprites the 
me in the handler is a reference to the sprite and not the actual 
behaviour instance. As a result any code that uses the me. syntax will 
end up not referencing the instance of the behaviour but rather the 
sprite. This will only become an issue if you have multiple behaviours 
attached to the same sprite with methods or properties named the same 
and referenced with the me. syntax. Did I explain that well enough? :-)

Maybe this is a small detail but I know that you usually find a way to 
cover most problems and thought I'd mention it incase you didn't 
realize the issue.

later,

Rob


> Hi everyone,
> 
> I've just posted an article on naming sprites at:
> 
> 
> 
> The latest version of my behavior works in both projectors and in Shockwave
> :-)
> 
> Enjoy,
> 
> James


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Re: Javascript to refresh Shockwave?

[Rob Romanek]

There is a new version up. I've incorporated Robert's request for hiding 
and moving. I have not thoroughly tested this on all major browsers but 
it's a start for playing around with. Tonight I just ran it on windows 
on IE 5.5 and NS 6. Interesting thing with the show hide code is that it 
works on IE but not NS 6, although that same code will work on layers 
that don't have shockwave in them. Movement is fine in both cases.

I've also added a movie that tracks mouse events outside of the 
shockwave movie and based on location will report on them. This could be 
used to track whether a submit button has been clicked (assuming you 
could keep relative location accurate across browsers) and if the submit 
button posts data to your server the shockwave movie could then go and 
extract that data and refresh its content without reloading as with the 
layered approach. Yeah its a brutal hack but it could work.

So looking at javascript to shockwave communication the approach might 
be to sniff for the browser and use a different method based on the browser.


Browser OS  Method
IE 4 and 5  Win EvalScript
IE 6Win 
I haven't tested yet
NS 4Win/Mac 
evalScript
NS 6Win/Mac 
layered or external mouse tracking
IE 5Mac 
layered or external mouse tracking

Hope that helps you out, Tab. (don't you just hate browsers :-)

Rob

PS if anyone else has time to check this out on various browser 
combinations I'd be interested in hearing your results.


Robert Tweed wrote:

> - Original Message -
> From: "Rob Romanek" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> 
>>http://www.manibus.com/testzone/writeShock/paramRefresh.htm
>>
>>This is the rewriting a layer approach.
>>
> 
> Just out of interest, have you tested that in all the major browsers? I
> don't have access to complete test facilities at the moment, so I can't do
> them all myself. Just curious to know if it works properly on them all, or
> if a few of them have problems. I'd also be interested to know if moving the
> layer containing the plugin, or changing the visibility works on all
> browsers too. I know it doesn't work with Java (except in IE on the PC), but
> I haven't tried it with Shockwave.
> 
> - Robert
> 


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Re: Javascript to refresh Shockwave?

[Rob Romanek]

Hey Tab,

take a look at,

http://www.manibus.com/testzone/writeShock/paramRefresh.htm

This is the rewriting a layer approach. There maybe one other way to do 
this without having to reload the shockwave movie and not use 
evalscript. I've got to run now but let me know what you think of this 
and I'll give you more details on the other method tonight.

Rob


Tab Julius wrote:

> 
> No, I haven't resolved it yet (haven't tried evalScript)..   Open to any 
> and all suggestions.
> 
>


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Re: Javascript to refresh Shockwave?

[Rob Romanek]

Hey Tab,

Did you ever resolve your javascript issues. As Robert mentioned 
evalScript falls short because of browser issues. His suggestion for the 
layer trick will work in NS4, NS6 and IE 5+ (on both PC and Mac as far 
as I know/remember). It means a reload of your shockwave movie each time 
but the rest of the page stays intact. If you haven't tried this out yet 
let me know I've got some code that does this that I can put up for you 
and you can test out. I have not rigourously test on all possible 
browser combinations (it might work on ie4, don't know about iCab, Opera 
etc.) but it should give you better distribution than evalScript.

later,

Rob


Tab Julius wrote:


> So, we have an HTML page with some checkboxes and a button - let's say 
> the button is to "refresh image" (based on the checkbox settings).
> 
> I *COULD* rig it up so that the button calls some CGI that builds a new 
> page with new params for the embedded .DCR and refreshes to that page, 
> but that is pretty unacceptable visually, as it reloads the whole page.
> 


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Re: is there a linecount for text members?

[Rob Romanek]

Hi Charlie,

Getting a line count for text members is doable if all the text is 
formated to the same font and line spacing. If that's the case then the 
following should work

on getTextLineCount aTextMem

--fixedLineSpace will return 0 if the line spacing was set automatically, 
so need to manually get the height of the first character, and add 1 
because Director always returns a height 1 pixel less than the true line 
spacing for the first line (at least on my Windows machine it does

lineHeight=aTextMem.charPosToLoc(1)+1

lastChar=aTextMem.text.chars.count
totalHeight=aTextMem.charPosToLoc(lastChar)
lineCount=totalHeight/lineHeight
return lineCount
end

If you are dealing with multiple fonts and line spacing then I think you 
are out of luck. Which it too bad because field members deal with multi 
fonts just fine, but there is no line spacing in them to complicate matters.

hth,

Rob


Charlie Fiskeaux II wrote:

> I know about linecount for field members (it counts every wrapped return as
> a new line as well as soft and hard returns), but is there any way to get
> the count of wrapped lines of text members?  member(x).text.lines.count only
> gives hard and soft return lines.


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Re: linked director movies

[Rob Romanek]

Hey Carol,

If you haven't had a read of my article on DOUG 
http://www.director-online.com/accessArticle.cfm?id=439

then you should have a look. It's getting a little old but it covers the 
big problems with LDMs. Primarily the mouseEnter/Within/Leave issue. 
Since the article (D7) support has been added for Quicktime movies to 
play within LDMs but there is still no editable text. You can set text 
to editable and it won't cause a crash like it used so that's a start. 
If you are changing text dynamically you will have to force the LDM to 
refresh it. There was a discussion on Direct-L about a month ago on 
this. Basically when you update text set the visible of the sprite, 
containing the text member, visible =0 then back to visible=1 and that 
is enough to force the refresh.

With audio you still have to work within the confines of 8 channels and 
there are some problems with cuepoints. I can't remember them all 
extactly but there always seems to be a workaround as well. So if you 
find you have problems let me know and I'll dig through my code library 
for a fix for you.

hth,

Rob


Carol Mahaffy wrote:

> hey list -- 
> I am thinking that linked director movies are way cool but I know from
> experience that first impressions are not what they seem in director. Can
> anyone give me input in regards to pit falls? mainly audio, quicktime ect. I
> want to use them in similiar fashion to a miaw. Before I get to far down the
> road, feedback on horror stories or things gone well would be good. thanks.


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Re: Interesting Question...

[Rob Romanek]

Hey Bhakti,

Globals cross the LDM scope as well this can be good and bad, in that 
you can transfer information across the whole project but unlike flash 
you don't have a simple way to have movie level variable, that is a 
global that is contained within the LDM. However this can be done, you 
can create "movie variables" I wrote about this for DOUG.

The other thing to remember about globals is if they hold a reference to 
an object then that object will act on whatever level it is being called 
from. So if an object has a method to change the member of sprite 5's 
member then if called from the stage it will act upon sprite 5 in the 
stage if you make the call from within an LDM it will act on sprite 5 of 
the LDM. The global can originate from anywhere, LDM  or stage and be 
used by anyone.

later,

Rob

bhakti wrote:

>but not if it's an ldm?
>
>Howdy-Tzi wrote:
>
>>At 17:05 +0100 05/22/2002, Jayp wrote:
>>
>>>Does that mean globals from my MAIN movie will pass to the subordinate
>>>shockwave movie?
>>>
>>If the two files are running under the same shock session, yes. That
>>is, if movie 1 did a play movie, go movie or gotonetmovie, yes, the
>>globals pass, just as they do in a projector or author session.
>>
>>--
>>


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Re: backward compatibility of director versions

[Rob Romanek]

Hey Nik,

Do a search on director-online. There was an article a while back, I 
believe by Colin Holgate, that talked about hacking your director 
documents so they can be opened with earlier versions of director.

 actually I just did a quick search, here is the url...

http://www.director-online.com/accessArticle.cfm?id=1034

Rob

nik crosina wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I have an urgent problem which is that I have developed a project on a PC with 
>Director v8.5 and now have to make it xplatform for the Mac.
>BUT I only have Director v8 on the Mac and it tells me that the file is too new to 
>open!!!
>Is there any way to make this happen as I do not fancy to redo the whole thing apart 
>form there not being enough time between now and the deadline!!!
>
>Thanks a million,
>Nik
>


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Re: linked director movie experts

[Rob Romanek]

Hey Leah,

I think the points that Jakob listed may be able to help you. Often 
problems in LDM's can be solved by restructuring the chain of command. 
That said I can't say that I've ever had experienced these refresh 
problems you are having. Probably the most extreme case of LDM testing 
I've done is have 16 instances of an LDM on screen with each instance 
containing 4 levels of nested LDMs each and somewhere down about the 4th 
level a quicktime movie is running along with some other animation and 
yes it all ran extremely slowly but it did run without crashing my 
fairly modest system.

I've never applied the above depth with rewinding or ffwding ldm's so it 
could be something in there that is causing the problem. Is this based 
on code that I put up a while back? If you don't ever rewind or ffwd 
does the problem occur? Does this happen with only one LDM or only with 
multiple LDMs? Can you provide samples of your code or a sample movie 
where this happens? If you can I wouldn't mind digging through it and 
trying to figure out what is going on.

Let me know...

Rob

Leah Kramer wrote:

>For those of you who have worked with linked director movies...
>
>
>A problem that I'm seeing from time to time, however, is that Director doesn't
>always repaint the ldm's stage when it should.  What I mean is that previous
>frames don't always get cleared before new frames are drawn.  So picture an
>animation of a person flapping his arms.  In some cases, 8 pairs of arms would
>show at once!
>


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Partial X-post: Linked Director Movies

[Rob Romanek]

Hi all,

I sent off an open letter to Macromedia about the need for proper implementation of 
linked director movies. Because it is kind of long I didn't want to post it here as 
well as Direct-L so if anyone on this list is interested in reading it and doesn't 
subscribe to Direct-L either dig
it up in the Direct-L archives or e-mail me and I can send it to you directly.

Thanks,

Rob

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Re: on beginSprite used in frame scripts

[Rob Romanek]

Tom Hines wrote:

> What I'm getting at is what is the purpose of the 'on prepareFrame' handler when the 
>'on beginSprite' handler can be used in a frame script?
> Is the 'on beginSprite' handler meant to be used in a frame script? Or an 'on 
>prepareFrame' handler to be used in a sprite script for that matter?
>

Hey Tom,

You right that on beginsprite only fires once. When the sprite is first born onto the 
stage. This is a good place to run code to initialize the sprite. On beginsprite can 
be used with either frame scripts or on actual sprites.Same with the on prepareFrame, 
or on enter/exitFrame for
that matter. They aren't limited to being placed only in frame scripts. If you have a 
ball sitting on the stage and you want it to animate then drop a behaviour on it that 
uses on prepareFrame to execute the animation.

on prepareFrame me
sprite(me.spriteNum).locH=sprite(me.spriteNum).locH+1
end

And again you can use a flag to turn the animation on and off. Have you experimented 
much with behaviours? Understand what properties are? If not read up on them, very 
powerful stuff.

HTH

Rob

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Re: Animating with Lingo

[Rob Romanek]

Kurt Griffin wrote:

> Don't use a repeat loop. You can use a frame loop, but that relies on frame
> rate. A better way is to drive your animation with a timeout object.
>
> Normally, I'd leave you with that advice and let you work through it, but I
> happen to have written a behavior that will move a sprite in a straight line
> to a destination point

> I'm sure there are ways to optimize... that's a hint, people - I'd love to
> see ways to improve it.

Hey Kurt,

Here is another take on the animation behaviour. It is time based but doesn't use 
timeout objects, instead it calculates the change in time at each enterframe and uses 
that to position the sprite.

Also have a look at the use if  the vector in this approach (difference between 
destination and origin) this really eliminates the need for working out the number of 
steps the animation will take as well as calculating the direction (taken care of by 
the vector).

Finally this behaviour allows you to differentiate between speed as in total time to 
get to the destination or speed as in the rate (pixels per second) it travels to get 
to the destination. This behaviour is not un-like the slide in out behaviour in the 
libraries palette. The one
that comes with director is more detailed and has more error checking.

let me know what you think,

Rob

---linearMotionTimeBased behaviour---

property pOrigin
property pDestination
property pSpeed
property pSpeedType
property pMotionInit
property pMotionVector
property pStartTime
property pTravelTime
property pInMotion

on getPropertyDescriptionList me
  pdl=[:]

  if the currentSpriteNum>0 then
pdl[#pOrigin]=[#comment:"Origin point", #format:#point, #default:point(sprite(the 
currentSpriteNum).locH, sprite(the currentSpriteNum).locV)]
pdl[#pDestination]=[#comment:"Destination", #format:#point, #default:point(0,0)]
pdl[#pSpeed]=[#comment:"Speed (msec or pixels/sec):", #format:#integer, 
#default:1000]
pdl[#pSpeedType]=[#comment:"Speed type:", #format:#symbol, #default:#totalTime, 
#range:[#totalTime, #pixelsPerSec]]
pdl[#pMotionInit]=[#comment:"AutoStart", #format:#boolean, #default:0]
  end if

  return pdl
end

on beginSprite me
  if pMotionInit then me.startLinearMotion()
end

on startLinearMotion me
  pMotionVector=pDestination-pOrigin
  if pSpeedType=#pixelsPerSec then
distance=sqrt(power(pMotionVector.locH,2)+power(pMotionVector.locV,2))
pTravelTime=distance/pSpeed*1000
  else
pTravelTime=pSpeed
  end if
  pStartTime=the milliseconds
  pInMotion=1
end

on enterFrame me
  if pInMotion then
dTime=the milliseconds-pStartTime*1.0
if dTime>pTravelTime then
  newLoc=pDestination
  pInMotion=0
else
  newLoc=pOrigin+dTime/pTravelTime*pMotionVector
end if
sprite(me.spriteNum).loc=newLoc
  end if
end


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Re: sendAllSprites vs. sprite(whichSprite).property

[Rob Romanek]

It's in the repeat loop just so it is executed enough times so that some valid numbers 
can be seen. Otherwise you are comparing less than a millisecond to less than a 
millisecond...kind of hard to figure out who's fastest then.

Rob

bhakti wrote:

> whoa! why do you have sendallsprites inside a repeat loop? doesn't that
> defeat the porpoise?
>
> --bhakti

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Re: sendAllSprites vs. sprite(whichSprite).property

[Rob Romanek]

Thanks for all the extra work Perry. I'll file that away for future reference...see if 
anything changes in D9.

Have you read Irv Kalb's article on data scripts (at DOUG) lots of fun those and can 
be manipulated to create what I like to think of as movie variables. Similar to your 
every present sprite... I just love Director there are so many ways to get the job 
done.

The nice thing about those secretive guys is they clean up after themselves after they 
leave the bar...don't want anyone to know they were there :-)

later,

Rob

Perry wrote:

> Using an ever present sprite to contain data rather than globals, like I do,
> is still a global kind of thing, really. So your globals and my "globals"
> are sort of the same thing, but with different hats.

> I'm picturing your main() object/movie script being the jovial
> guy behind the bar and mine being the secretive guy, lurking in a corner,
> clinging to his table. ;-)

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Re: sendAllSprites vs. sprite(whichSprite).property

[Rob Romanek]

Howdy-Tzi wrote:

>
> I'll stick with the slightly sloppier, marginally slower method, just
> to avoid the housekeeping involved with the repeat loops to begin
> with. ;)

I agree to stick with what works and makes development the fastest after all when you 
are not doing the messaging hundreds or thousands of times then we're looking at 
fraction of a millisecond differences here.

Still it is fun to explore this stuff!

later,

Rob

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Re: sendAllSprites vs. sprite(whichSprite).property

[Rob Romanek]

Hey Colin,

As far as keeping track of lists of sprites I wrote an article about this for DOUG. It 
uses lists and repeat loops for messaging specific groups of sprites. When I was 
working on it I did a bunch of testing similar to what I posted but with movies of  
500 sprites. Of course I can't
find those numbers now but found in general the same things shown by Pez and myself 
here that with lots of sprites and all over the place I got better performance with 
the repeat loop. Also the behaviour I used allowed for a bunch of sprites all having 
the same handler but being
broken down into groups so you could specifically call a subset of sprites and not 
worry about others responding to the handler call.

Even if the repeat loop approach is a bit slower I liked the grouping flexibility that 
I got over the shotgun approach of "sendAllSprites"

The article can be found at: http://www.director-online.com/accessArticle.cfm?id=843

later,

Rob

Colin Holgate wrote:

> >If Director does store a list of currently available handlers, then I
> >daresay it does it badly.
>
> I like the research!  Can you do a test where there are lots and lots
> of sprites, but that only a few have the handler? Compare that
> against there only being those few sprites.
>
> One of the nice things about sendallsprites is that you don't have to
> keep track of the sprite channels. If you have to move them around
> they still work. With hard wired numbers you would have to update
> your lists.

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Re: sendAllSprites vs. sprite(whichSprite).property

[Rob Romanek]

Rob Romanek wrote:

> then populate channels 1 to 140 with shape sprites with now behaviours on them and 
>the numbers change a bit.

That should "NO behaviours on them". Don't know what a now behaviour is but I'm 
certain I didn't use any. :-)

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Re: sendAllSprites vs. sprite(whichSprite).property

[Rob Romanek]

Hey Howdy,

sendAllSprite is not always faster than doing a repeat loop. It depends on how many 
sprites are in the score, how many sprites you are trying to communicate with and 
where they are located in the score.

If you have only 10 sprites in a 150 channel score, and only those 10 sprites placed 
where-ever, and you want to target all of them, then using sendAllsprites comes in at 
about 1/2 the speed of the repeat loop. (takes less then a millisecond on my PII 400, 
repeated 100 times and I
get values like 16 and 32 milliseconds for sendAll and repeat loop respectively) 
However put those 10 sprites in channels 141 to 150 and then populate channels 1 to 
140 with shape sprites with now behaviours on them and the numbers change a bit. 
SendAll comes in at about 45 mSec and
repeatLoop at 33 mSec. I think my testing scripts are valid and I've included them 
below, let me know if you think otherwise.

later,

Rob



Here are the scripts I used:

On 10 shape sprites I placed the following behaviour:

global gcounter

on doit me
  gcounter=gcounter+1
end


my movie script is :

global gCounter

on test
  gCounter=0
  t=the milliseconds
  repeat with j=1 to 100
sendAllsprites(#doit)
  end repeat

  put the milliseconds-t
  put gCounter

  gCounter=0
  t=the milliseconds
  repeat with j=1 to 100
repeat with i = 141 to 150
  sendsprite(i, #doit)
end repeat
  end repeat

  put the milliseconds-t
  put gCounter
end


Howdy-Tzi wrote:

> At 21:01 -0800 03/19/2002, Patrick Mamode wrote:
>
> >I have a group of sprites that must respond to an
> >event. Will I see a decrease in performance if I use
> >sendAllSprites rather than setting up a repeat loop to
> >individually manipulate each sprite through
> >sprite(whichSprite)?
>
> You DEFINITELY want to use sendAllSprites rather than a repeat loop.
> sendAllSprites takes more time than sendSprite, but it is orders of
> magnitude faster than a repeat cycle.
>
> >When is it more appropriate to use sendAllSprites?
>
> When you have more than one sprite to send stuff too, or if you're
> not needing to go by specific sprite numbers.

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Re: clarification: STRINGS don't need to be strings.

[Rob Romanek]

Hi Nmuta,

Don't know why the [ ] worked for you but I think what you need is the value( ) 
command.

ie.
put value("random(5)")

or

gVariable="Hi there"

put value("gVariable")
--"Hi there"

hth

Rob

Nmuta Jones wrote:

>
> The variable from Flash was random(5).  when I passed that through, I got
> "random(5)".  but it's funny, in the message window, I did
>
> put NumberNew and I got -- "random(5)"
> but then
> put [NumberNew] gave me 3.
>
> so it worked that way.

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Re: globals

[Rob Romanek]

As Howdy says, the prop list is probably the way you want to go, I too am not sure 
what exactly you are trying to do but here is some other info about globals

Using the globals director returns an object that contains all the globals, try the 
following in the message window (remember any variables declared in the message window 
are automatically globals)

gTest=44

put (the globals).gTest
--44

(the globals)[#gTest2]=55

put gTest2
--55

Note all globals are symbols, can't use a string like a regular prop list.

so for dynamically created globals you could do...

x="Howdy"
y="_Tzi"

(the globals)[symbol(x&y)]="Director Guru"

put Howdy_Tzi
-- "Director Guru"

fun eh?

this can get messy though so look into organizing your dynamic variables into a prop 
list to keep your movie clean.

Rob

Howdy-Tzi wrote:

> At 09:55 -0800 02/27/2002, Dustin Harris wrote:
>
> >anyone know how to name a list that is also a global... is there a
> >way to add globals on the fly?
>
> Hmm, based on the sample you sent along with this you might want to
> look into using a global property list instead. What is it you want
> to do, exactly?
>

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Re: Sprite channels more than 1000 in D8

[Rob Romanek]

Hey James you missed a link to another good aritcle. :-)

Stanly,

If you want a detailed step by step process for creating LDM and an overview of some 
of their special considerations then check out:

http://www.director-online.com/accessArticle.cfm?id=439

along with the two excellent links James posted.

later,

Rob


James Newton wrote:

>
> Linked Director Movies are even more powerful: you can move sprites around
> inside the movie.  To create an LDM, just create a Director movie and save
> it, then open a new movie, and import the saved Director movie.  With care,
> you can use LDMs to create complex widgets in a single sprite channel.
>
> You can find examples of LDMs at ...
> >>http://perso.planetb.fr/newton/index.html#linked
> You can also find an article on creating filmloops on the fly at...
> >>http://www.director-online.com/accessArticle.cfm?id=154

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