Re: New Image Features
Scott Rossi wrote: Whenever I see the term notSrcBic, for a split second I think: A Bic lighter should not be used to ignite this object. Ha! That's my reaction too. :) I have used SuperCard's inks, and now MetaCard's, but most of the terms still don't make much sense to me and I always have to just click my way through the list until I get the effect I am looking for. I have looked for some sort of descriptive explanation of what each ink does but haven't found any. Even SuperCard's animated visual example didn't always make it clear to me what to expect. Would you be willing to post a short description of each type of ink and how it behaves? I would love to have the information and I am sure many others would too. -- Jacqueline Landman Gay | [EMAIL PROTECTED] HyperActive Software | 612-724-1596 Custom hypermedia solutions| http://www.hyperactivesw.com Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard@lists.runrev.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm Please send bug reports to [EMAIL PROTECTED], not this list.
Re: Fastest Development environment
Geoff Canyon wrote/ schreef: First, MetaCard surprised me by being able to move 50 32x32 images reasonably well. It's not as smooth as JewelToy, but much better than I expected. I'm using images with the fileName property set to a gif. Has anyone tested to see if there's a better option? MMmm, did you try having buttons with the icon set to the ID of an (already imported) image? I hadn't, but now I have. I've now upped the number of images to 100, then to 200, in an effort to break MetaCard's spirit. This is all on a PowerBook G3 400, which while no slouch is not a fast machine by today's standard. MetaCard was able to move 100 32x32 images around the screen and still look pretty good doing it. 200 images got me to about 3 frames per second, with noticeable jumps in the movement of the images. I had to go so far in order to figure out which was faster: images with a reference to an external gif, or buttons with an icon reference to an imported image. The images are a little bit faster, but only a little. One difference is that the images are noticeably faster when some of them are moving offscreen. Obviously the smart thing to do in this circumstance is to not move things that can't be seen by the user. But still, if many of the images are offscreen, images are faster than buttons. Does anyone know of a way to reliably compare animation rates? In SuperCard, I would use the nudge command. That way I would know that the same number of frames were being animated no matter what and I could time the results to compare. As it is, I just added objects until the frame rate became visible, and compared that way. Finally, I tried locking messages while the animation was happening, and this didn't seem to have much of an effect, which surprised me. I expected significant overhead to be reduced if MetaCard didn't have to pay attention to what was happening everywhere and pass it on to my objects. Either the overhead isn't significant, or locking messages doesn't operate at a low enough level to help this, or my testing was flawed. Regards, Geoff Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard@lists.runrev.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm Please send bug reports to [EMAIL PROTECTED], not this list.
Re: New Image Features
Geoff Canyon ecrivait / wrote: I think of Bic pens. What the heck _does_ it stand for? Black Is Changed don't ask more ;-) -- (-8 domi Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard@lists.runrev.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm Please send bug reports to [EMAIL PROTECTED], not this list.
stackfiletype oddities
I'm having some trouble with the stackFileType property. My app supports multiple file types, all MetaCard stacks, so I use handlers like this when I save them to set the stackFileType dynamically: on DoSaveJournal pDocStack put the stackfileType into tSaveStackFileType set the stackFileType to MONKRTJF set the uDirty of stack pDocStack to empty compact stack pDocStack save stack pDocStack Err the result set the stackFileType to tSaveStackFileType end DoSaveJournal Files generated in this manner are showing up with MetaCard's creator code and file type. Do I need to allow an idle between the time I set this property and when it's used? -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 ICQ#60248349Fax: 323-225-0716 Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard@lists.runrev.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm Please send bug reports to [EMAIL PROTECTED], not this list.
Re: Digest metacard.v004.n326
...But the rest of us need a more common English reference and a bit of explanation. Where does one draw the line? With the destroyStack property. ;) ... C++ programmers understand destroy and lay people don't, but everyone understands purge -- why not purgeStack and purgeWindow properties? Highly agreed. This isn't the xTalk list, but this still is of pretty big importance... I never have used the destroyStack command (maybe because it sounded too scary, aside from the fact that I probably didn't have a use for it) , but it always sounded a little scary to me. Purge sounds much, much better... can we at least get this used an a synonym in future releases? Where does one draw the line? I vote for syntax in common terminology which the majority of people can understand. Avoidance of technical jargon is important in an xtalk language. Blend is technical jargon apparently familiar to graphic designers. But is blend really so technical? I want to blend this image with whatever is behind it. This doesn't sound like technical jargon to me. I think you have a stronger case against: srcCopy, notSrcAnd, noop, notSrcXor, etc etc. Agreed as well.Can we simply have adjectives from now on? I think MC need more workers so Scott can implement all this ;-) Transparency (or even opacity) is self-explanatory to anyone. The same jargon occurs with alphaData -- undoubtedly familiar to graphics programmers, but not so familiar to us. I agree, but I think you might concur that alphaData is more approachable than the above terms. This may just be a naive guess of mine, but I'm guessing most people using these properties will already be familiar with things like alpha masks from various image-editing apps. If you're using a pretty-high level property like this, you're probably also familiar with graphics programs in general. Would you be willing to post a short description of each type of ink and how it behaves? I would love to have the information and I am sure many others would too. This would be darn useful, but alas, I'm sure the only person who knows this is the first bad guy who infiltrated some scripting language's programming staff and tried to change the english-sounding language to straight, abbreviation-filled code! ;-) -- Karl Becker, KB Productions - http://www.karlbecker.com Featuring:New Tricks, Tiger's Eye Pub, and The Fishin' Hole Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard@lists.runrev.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm Please send bug reports to [EMAIL PROTECTED], not this list.
Re: Fastest Development environment
- Original Message - From: Geoff Canyon [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2001 10:55 AM Subject: Re: Fastest Development environment Geoff Canyon wrote/ schreef: First, MetaCard surprised me by being able to move 50 32x32 images reasonably well. It's not as smooth as JewelToy, but much better than I expected. I'm using images with the fileName property set to a gif. Has anyone tested to see if there's a better option? MMmm, did you try having buttons with the icon set to the ID of an (already imported) image? I hadn't, but now I have. I've now upped the number of images to 100, then to 200, in an effort to break MetaCard's spirit. This is all on a PowerBook G3 400, which while no slouch is not a fast machine by today's standard. MetaCard was able to move 100 32x32 images around the screen and still look pretty good doing it. 200 images got me to about 3 frames per second, with noticeable jumps in the movement of the images. I had to go so far in order to figure out which was faster: images with a reference to an external gif, or buttons with an icon reference to an imported image. The images are a little bit faster, but only a little. One difference is that the images are noticeably faster when some of them are moving offscreen. Obviously the smart thing to do in this circumstance is to not move things that can't be seen by the user. But still, if many of the images are offscreen, images are faster than buttons. Did you set the 'alwaysBuffer' of each image to true? If not, that might increase display speed. As the 2.3.2 Metatalk Ref says: Setting an image's alwaysBuffer property to true forces that image to uncompress its data into a buffer even if that image is hidden. This increases memory usage but also decreases the delay before an image appears when it is shown. Phil Davis Does anyone know of a way to reliably compare animation rates? In SuperCard, I would use the nudge command. That way I would know that the same number of frames were being animated no matter what and I could time the results to compare. As it is, I just added objects until the frame rate became visible, and compared that way. Finally, I tried locking messages while the animation was happening, and this didn't seem to have much of an effect, which surprised me. I expected significant overhead to be reduced if MetaCard didn't have to pay attention to what was happening everywhere and pass it on to my objects. Either the overhead isn't significant, or locking messages doesn't operate at a low enough level to help this, or my testing was flawed. Regards, Geoff Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard@lists.runrev.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm Please send bug reports to [EMAIL PROTECTED], not this list. Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard@lists.runrev.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm Please send bug reports to [EMAIL PROTECTED], not this list.
Re: New Image Features (Digest...)
This discussion is degenerating into whom should we choose to design the metatalk language since Metacard does such a lousy job. This idea that the language should be easily understood (with no effort at all) by the average person aka us is total crap. The average person uses a computer for email and shopping (if at all) not programing, those who need to develop applications even at a minimal level are not exactly average since they acquire knowledge the average person does not even dream about. Also this us thing is most inaccurate: Scott Rossi knows a lot more about multimedia/graphics then I do, I probably know more about other things then he does (his technical vocabulary is different than mine). The only us here is that we both use Metacard, not necessarily the same set of features. I followed similar discussions on the xTalk list and there are as many opinions as members on the list - no one is average. Ultimately users (developers) will have to learn to associate a name with a concept even if it doesn't sound English enough for them for the simple reason that English language is struggling itself to keep up with zillion new concepts and ideas that need new names every day. Funny thing is that I never heard this sort of complains about metatalk from the international crowd (well, with one exception;-), I guess they don't believe in the lowest common denominator as standard for the vocabulary of a language. Andu Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard@lists.runrev.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm Please send bug reports to [EMAIL PROTECTED], not this list.
Re: New Image Features (Digest...)
andu wrote: This idea that the language should be easily understood (with no effort at all) by the average person aka us is total crap. I heard this same retort ten years ago from a rabid DOS user who sneered at anyone who used a GUI. -- Jacqueline Landman Gay | [EMAIL PROTECTED] HyperActive Software | 612-724-1596 Custom hypermedia solutions| http://www.hyperactivesw.com Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard@lists.runrev.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm Please send bug reports to [EMAIL PROTECTED], not this list.
RE: AVI on CD Problems
Hi Terry If the stack is on the CD along with the AVI then you should be able to use relative file paths without any problems. Note you need to use UNIX standard delimiter / in your path name in MC instead of platform specific characters like the DOS \ you used in your example. Also if your stack is at the root of the CD and DITBOX is a directory from the root then DITBOX/Splashscreen.avi would be the correct relative path. One problem with relative paths is that it always goes from MC's current working directory. This will change every time you open a file or set the directory in a script. The directory is set at startup to be the location of the engine (or the stack that loaded the engine). With this in mind the easyest thing to do is to put the directory into a custom prperty at startUp then use that property like this: put the directory into tSaveDirectory set the directory to the cDirectory of this stack do whatever set the directory to tSaveDirectory Regards Monte I'm having problems playing a AVI in my stack... The AVI movie only works with the full directory as a path. Example: C:\DITBOX\Splashscreen.avi --This works \DITBOX\Splashscreen.avi --This dosen't However I need a relative path because this stack will be on a cd with a changing drive letter. I've heard some talk of use of the externals collection to find the drive letter but so far I have been unsuccessful. Any Ideas? How about using 'there is a file filePath' within a repeat loop on startup to locate a designated file and the drive letter associated with it and then construct your filepaths from there (I'm not really a PC person and not yet familiar with the vagaries of MC or MetaTalk so don't be surprised if this doesn't work). put abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz into PotentialDrives repeat with i = 1 to 26 if there is a file (char i of tPotentialDrives :\ filePath) then return (char i of PotentialDrives) -- use this to build your filePaths exit repeat end if end repeat Cheers, Terry... -- __ _ Dr Terry Judd Multimedia Developer Biomedical Multimedia Unit Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry Health Sciences The University of Melbourne Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: 03 9344 0187 Fax: 03 9344 4998 __ _ Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard@lists.runrev.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm Please send bug reports to [EMAIL PROTECTED], not this list. Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard@lists.runrev.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm Please send bug reports to [EMAIL PROTECTED], not this list.
Answer dialog replacement
I'm attempting to replace the answer dialog with a separate handler in my stack. (I'll call it displayMessage) This handler, which I've created and works fine, makes a group that consists of a few graphics, the text the user is prompted with, and whatever choices is passed to it. It moves the group to the middle of the screen The reason for doing this is that a graphic inside the group has a blend ink and plays with the card's visual appearance when it appears. Everything works fine with the handler, except for one thing - how could I get the value of the button the user clicks on? I'd ideally like to use this handler just like the answer command works, but I don't know how to pause execution of the script that calls displayMessage. Any ideas on how, or even if, this is possible? Thanks! -- Karl Becker, KB Productions - http://www.karlbecker.com Featuring:New Tricks, Tiger's Eye Pub, and The Fishin' Hole Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard@lists.runrev.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm Please send bug reports to [EMAIL PROTECTED], not this list.
RE: Answer dialog replacement
Script in the group: on mouseUp if word 1 of the target is button then put the short name of the target into it end mouseUp I'm attempting to replace the answer dialog with a separate handler in my stack. (I'll call it displayMessage) This handler, which I've created and works fine, makes a group that consists of a few graphics, the text the user is prompted with, and whatever choices is passed to it. It moves the group to the middle of the screen The reason for doing this is that a graphic inside the group has a blend ink and plays with the card's visual appearance when it appears. Everything works fine with the handler, except for one thing - how could I get the value of the button the user clicks on? I'd ideally like to use this handler just like the answer command works, but I don't know how to pause execution of the script that calls displayMessage. Any ideas on how, or even if, this is possible? Thanks! -- Karl Becker, KB Productions - http://www.karlbecker.com Featuring:New Tricks, Tiger's Eye Pub, and The Fishin' Hole Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard@lists.runrev.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm Please send bug reports to [EMAIL PROTECTED], not this list. Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/metacard@lists.runrev.com/ Info: http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/mailinglist.htm Please send bug reports to [EMAIL PROTECTED], not this list.
