Comparison of Multimedia Prowess - Director and Revolution
-- -- I'm still looking for the friendliest programming or non-programming environment for multimedia development. There does not exist a non-programmer's solution, so here I am. Recent exploration has revealed that Director no longer is pursuing a verbose programming solution, (Lingo), but has switched entirely over to javascript. Can someone please tell me how the black hole that is javascript came to be so influential in our galaxy? I know it was written by aliens, but how did they get so much universal power? So, as far as a verbose, English-like solution, there isn't anything else other than Revolution that I would even consider trying to tackle. But my application goals are entirely in the realm of multimedia production. I don't see many multimedia or game oriented programs being written in Transcript, but that could just be due to lack of interest among the Revolution community. I've casually investigated Malte's arcade engine, but that is not exactly everything I would need to emulate some of Director's built-in functionality. I know that Revolution doesn't supply these kinds of templates, but, as regards overall functionality and prowess in multimedia, can someone with experience of both environments comment on similarities, differences and strengths of both development platforms? Also, Director supports, probably the largest set of graphic and video formats; how does Revolution compare in this area? Thanks, Greg Smith ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Comparison of Multimedia Prowess - Director and Revolution
On Oct 10, 2006, at 6:25 AM, Greg Smith wrote: -- I'm still looking for the friendliest programming or non- programming environment for multimedia development. There does not exist a non-programmer's solution, so here I am. ... But my application goals are entirely in the realm of multimedia production. I don't see many multimedia or game oriented programs being written in Transcript, but that could just be due to lack of interest among the Revolution community. I've casually investigated Malte's arcade engine, but that is not exactly everything I would need to emulate some of Director's built-in functionality. I know that Revolution doesn't supply these kinds of templates, but, as regards overall functionality and prowess in multimedia, can someone with experience of both environments comment on similarities, differences and strengths of both development platforms? Also, Director supports, probably the largest set of graphic and video formats; how does Revolution compare in this area? Hi Greg, To begin with I haven't developed any products with Director since 7 so I am a little out of the loop on it's current features. I'll let someone else do a feature comparison. In any case, even comparing Director's features from version 7 to Rev's current features, Rev can't touch Director when you compare raw multimedia power. Director was built for that sort of stuff. That being said, I do develop multimedia based applications in Revolution as there are certain areas where Rev can really shine. My company creates e-learning and interactive history software. We generate graphics on the fly from databases and use lots of QuickTime. One benefit Revolution offers is that you can create true software applications. When I used Director and Authorware, it wasn't possible to create something like looked like software. For the software we develop, that was a key feature. Revolution has been making important improvements in multimedia support lately. In 2.7 they reworked the underlying graphics architecture (anti-aliased graphics were added at this time) which appears to have provided the ground work for enhancements in the future. In the end, multimedia is such a broad term that Rev can be said to well suited for some multimedia projects but not so well for others. What types of features in Director were you using that you need to use going forward? That is probably the best way to determine if Rev will work for you. -- Trevor DeVore Blue Mango Learning Systems - www.bluemangolearning.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Comparison of Multimedia Prowess - Director and Revolution
Trevor: Currently, I don't own either Director or Revolution. To start with, I need to quickly put together an application that presents and links various QuickTime movies together in a logical fashion, complete with a navigation and link system, as well as supplimentary texts - basically a branching media presentation with navigation. I also need to implement Kagi's KRM module for sales. They already support the Director platform. Later, I'd like to get more game-like in the genres of the classic King's Quest adventure style, as well as more action-based 2D games along the lines of a side-scroller. I know these are two completely different applications for any software to consider producing. What I have been able to determine is, that in the case of the first, nearly no programming would be needed to perform it in Director, whereas some programming would be necessary in Revolution. And, in the second case, programming would most definitely be required via either platform. It sure would be nice if there existed some video tutorials showing how to do either of these things on either platform. Then, an objective opinion could easily be performed by potential purchasers of either software. Greg Smith -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Comparison-of-Multimedia-Prowess---Director-and-Revolution-tf2417069.html#a6741367 Sent from the Revolution - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Comparison of Multimedia Prowess - Director and Revolution
Hi Greg, It is true that Director has some out of the box features that makes it easier to create things without coding. First of all the metaphor is quite different. Director is a timeline tool, that allows tweening. You can set Keyframes for the objects and let director perfor the transition from one state to the other along the timeline. This is useful for a basic level of things you might want to do. Later, I'd like to get more game-like in the genres of the classic King's Quest adventure style, as well as more action-based 2D games along the lines of a side-scroller. When it comes to scripting games Director isn´t much more helpful than any other tool you can get (even though the ability to tween is a plus for Director here too). You will still need to set up your game logic, deal with writing collision detection routines, AI and even motion of your sprites. In other words you will need to tacle lots of math and logic. I am trying my best to reduce the pain involved with AE and I think I did quite a good job on the way until now. Given that you do not like the Javascript like Syntax in Director (the last version I own is a copy of MX 2004. It could use both JavaScript and Dot syntax ). Revolution is a good choice for the type of games you want to make. Easier even in combination with AE. The downside of Director (At least up to MX 2004) is: It doesn´t look native. Nagging exit screens. Less supported platforms. No universal binaries. Far more expensive. More Resource hungry. Downsides of Rev: No flash support. No multichannel Audio Clips. No tweening. It sure would be nice if there existed some video tutorials showing how to do either of these things on either platform. Then, an objective opinion could easily be performed by potential purchasers of either software. I can not help with the Director part of this. However you might want to download the free set of tutorials I wrote: http://www.derbrill.de/tutorials_e.html Also if you run a trial of Revolution at the moment you might want to trial AE as well: http://www.runrev.com/section/revselect/arcadeengine/downloads/ae201.zip It comes with a self contained Documentation stack that might be helpful. I've casually investigated Malte's arcade engine, but that is not exactly everything I would need to emulate some of Director's built-in functionality. Eager to learn more here. What do you miss? All the best, Malte ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Comparison of Multimedia Prowess - Director and Revolution
On Oct 10, 2006, at 10:28 AM, GregSmith wrote: Trevor: Currently, I don't own either Director or Revolution. To start with, I need to quickly put together an application that presents and links various QuickTime movies together in a logical fashion, complete with a navigation and link system, as well as supplimentary texts - basically a branching media presentation with navigation. This should be pretty straightforward in Rev and would be very easy to prototype. Do you have a trial version of Rev right now? First question - When you say that you want to link movies together do you want a Table of Contents or do you want to present one movie and then provide a link to another after it finishes playing? I also need to implement Kagi's KRM module for sales. They already support the Director platform. I too am waiting for Kagi support. I've seen it implemented in other dev environments and the purchasing process is pretty slick. Later, I'd like to get more game-like in the genres of the classic King's Quest adventure style, as well as more action-based 2D games along the lines of a side-scroller. I saw that Malte already responded to you about which is good since I have nothing relevant to add anyway :-) -- Trevor DeVore Blue Mango Learning Systems - www.bluemangolearning.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Comparison of Multimedia Prowess - Director and Revolution
Malte: Thanks for the detailed reply. I'm not familiar enough with all the functionality of the Arcade Engine to comment on what more it needs. But, for me to be able to use it for my purposes, I would need very specific visual examples explaining how to do these things. I think that anything is learnable and doable. Especially with regard to Revolution. Anything that is explained directly, pictorially, by example, visually, can be made understandable to most people. So, what I would like to see, but by no means, expect, is really good video tutorials demonstrating, step-by-step, how to assemble a basic interactive media project, of the sort I mentioned, as well as similar training videos showing, graphically, how to put together a basic adventure game and a basic side-scroller game. Now, this is an incredibly tall order and I really don't expect to see anything along these lines . . . , well, maybe, never. It's just too much work for any developer to add to their already huge list of things to do. But, you did ask. Greg Smith -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Comparison-of-Multimedia-Prowess---Director-and-Revolution-tf2417069.html#a6742115 Sent from the Revolution - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Comparison of Multimedia Prowess - Director and Revolution
Trevor: Ideally, what I would like to make happen, but I don't think Revolution provides the tools to do this, is to provide links inside one QuickTime movie, while it is running, that will jump to a specific place in another movie, and provide a link back to the jumping off point. This is probably only doable with a product like LiveStage Pro. But, if something outside the movie, Revolution-wise, could do the same thing, I'd settle for that. Making a video as directly interactive as it can be, saves lots of time and provides a really valuable learning resource. Cross-reference-able video training, if you will. But having a card-based system that does the same thing might just have to be good enough, especially in light of Kagi and its KRM module. Greg Smith -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Comparison-of-Multimedia-Prowess---Director-and-Revolution-tf2417069.html#a6742306 Sent from the Revolution - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Comparison of Multimedia Prowess - Director and Revolution
Well for what it is worth, 2 points: (admittedly based on 6 months work with Director 5 years ago) 1. Moving from Fortran, Basic, Pascal (blah, blah, blah) to Hypercard was a fairly smooth process (and hence into Metacard and Runtime Revolution) allowing me to produce something effective fairly rapidly. 2. 5 years ago the EFL department of the University of the United Arab Emirates (where I was working at the time) decided to throw out their Macintosh computers and replace them with Pentium IIIs running Microsoft Windows 98. So I had to dump all my Hypercard stuff and start to produce for Windows - and was set up with TOOLBOOK and DIRECTOR. TOOLBOOK struck me, at the time, as cumbersome, with none of the advantages of Director, nor the simplicity of Hypercard. DIRECTOR struck me as Superb!!! capable of producing things for both Mac and Windows that made Hypercard look fairly second class. However, I found that I sat and stared at DIRECTOR and its very complicated manual for about 2 weeks before I produced anything at all (maybe I am just stupid ???) - a very steep learning curve indeed and very expensive in terms of man-hours. I have not looked at anything much apart from RR and Metacard for the last 5 years because I have not needed to. Certainly my own humble forays into multimedia with RR seem to indicate that it far outstrips what Hypercard had to offer - admittedly part of that may be down to my G4 rather than the old Performa 5200 I had in the UAE. Should I decide to go all out for a bells-and-whistles multimedia production I would not both to change over to Director. I would either stick with xTalk or go towards Quicktime. sincerely, Richmond Mathewon Philosophical problems are confusions arising owing to the fluidity of meanings users attach to words and phrases. Mathewson, 2006 ___ Inbox full of spam? Get leading spam protection and 1GB storage with All New Yahoo! Mail. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Comparison of Multimedia Prowess - Director and Revolution
Richmond: So, you would opt for doing all kinds of multi-media inside of a QuickTime container, via a resource like LiveStage Pro, or something like it? Do you know anything about QuickMedia, that French product? Looks interesting, but without proper english training resources, it might be really difficult to tap its power. Thanks, Greg Smith -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Comparison-of-Multimedia-Prowess---Director-and-Revolution-tf2418554.html#a6742468 Sent from the Revolution - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Comparison of Multimedia Prowess - Director and Revolution
On Oct 10, 2006, at 11:21 AM, GregSmith wrote: Trevor: Ideally, what I would like to make happen, but I don't think Revolution provides the tools to do this, is to provide links inside one QuickTime movie, while it is running, that will jump to a specific place in another movie, and provide a link back to the jumping off point. This is probably only doable with a product like LiveStage Pro. But, if something outside the movie, Revolution-wise, could do the same thing, I'd settle for that. You have a couple of different options here. The EnhancedQT external, which provides additional QT functionality in Rev, might be useful to you. You can get it here http://bluemangolearning.com/ developer/revolution/ and it is free. It is possible to add Wired Sprites to your movies using LiveStage and program text to be sent to the hosting application (Revolution). Rev player objects (what you play QT movies in) receive the QTDebugStr message which you can send form LiveStage using DebugStr. Using the EQT external you can also get these messages sent to a player object: QTApplicationNumberAndString pNumber, pString QTFSCommand pCommand, pArgument QTStatusMsg pType, pMsg (pType can be streaming,error or urllink) QTMovieLoadState pState (see qtGetMovieLoadState documentation for possible values of pState) QTHotSpotEnter pHotSpotID QTHotSpotLeave pHotSpotID I've used QTApplicationNumberAndString in the past since I can send two parameters as opposed to one. Either way works since parsing text in Rev is such a snap. So you could have a button that when clicked sent a command using DebugStr() that looked like this: Command=GoToVideo Name=VideName.mov You could set up all sorts of commands similar to the above that Rev would process and use to navigate to other moveis. Another option is to include the instructions in text tracks. EQT has the qtRegisterTextSampleCallback command which allows you to specify a text track and a msg to be sent each time a new sample in the text track is loaded. You could include instructions in the text tracks that would tell Rev to display a navigation button and instruct the button where to navigate to. I would prefer this option since you could customize the buttons and user experience in Rev which is easier to author in than LiveStage Pro. In the end, the basic idea is to come up with a system of commands that could instruct Rev what to do based on instructions coming from the movie being played. -- Trevor DeVore Blue Mango Learning Systems - www.bluemangolearning.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Comparison of Multimedia Prowess - Director and Revolution
Quicktime. . . Of course (!!!) one of the good things about Runtime Revolution (and, to be fair, Hypercard) is that if you produce something with Quicktime you can then access and control it via an RR front-end. I would be wary, however, of QT, because I , personally, am developing for Debian-based Linux (Ubuntu) just at the moment . . . and (one of Richmond's contentious hobby-horses now enters stage-left) QT and Linux don't go well together and (cough, cough, cough) RR isn't exactly running to help things in that direction. sincerely, Richmond Mathewson Philosophical problems are confusions arising owing to the fluidity of meanings users attach to words and phrases. Mathewson, 2006 ___ All new Yahoo! Mail The new Interface is stunning in its simplicity and ease of use. - PC Magazine http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Comparison of Multimedia Prowess - Director and Revolution
Err... Isn't QT an apple product, apple should be the one trying port the thing to Linux, not RR On Oct 10, 2006, at 4:41 PM, Richmond Mathewson wrote: and (cough, cough, cough) RR isn't exactly running to help things in that direction. ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Comparison of Multimedia Prowess - Director and Revolution
Trevor: Thanks very much for the explicit and detailed instructions. Not being, by any stretch of the imagination, a programmer, this will take me quite some time to digest. LiveStage, despite being very powerful in what it can do, I don't find extremely friendly to the likes of me. Thanks again, Greg Smith You have a couple of different options here. The EnhancedQT external, which provides additional QT functionality in Rev, might be useful to you. You can get it here http://bluemangolearning.com/ developer/revolution/ and it is free. It is possible to add Wired Sprites to your movies using LiveStage and program text to be sent to the hosting application (Revolution). Rev player objects (what you play QT movies in) receive the QTDebugStr message which you can send form LiveStage using DebugStr. -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Comparison-of-Multimedia-Prowess---Director-and-Revolution-tf2417069.html#a6744926 Sent from the Revolution - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Comparison of Multimedia Prowess - Director and Revolution
On Oct 10, 2006, at 1:39 PM, GregSmith wrote: Trevor: Thanks very much for the explicit and detailed instructions. Not being, by any stretch of the imagination, a programmer, this will take me quite some time to digest. LiveStage, despite being very powerful in what it can do, I don't find extremely friendly to the likes of me. If you have any questions or need further explanations about things just ask. -- Trevor DeVore Blue Mango Learning Systems - www.bluemangolearning.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
