for Director developers

Very interesting article. Which basically answered my first question right at the end (below). I do remember eventually mastering the MIAW feature only to find that…

<quote from article>

All WFS windows and other multi-sprites are on a single Stage. MIAW (Movies In A Window) windows are on separate Stages. MIAW supports parent child relationships much like WFS does. But MIAW is unsupported in Shockwave. MIAW only works in Authoring and Projector run modes.

If you want different Stages for windows in Shockwave pieces, they must be in different browser windows. They must be separate .DCR files. But then there are considerable problems getting windows to talk with one another easily and quickly, because of cross-browser, cross-platform Javascript issues. WFS is a solution for windowed Shockwave work.

MIAW requires Lingo scripting whereas non-programmers can use the WFS drag and drop behaviors more easily. Some people therefore use WFS as a replacement for MIAW. But MIAW has features that WFS does not.

> Very interesting article.

Thanks, Are.

> Which basically answered my first question right at the end
> (below). I do remember eventually mastering the MIAW feature only to find that…
>
> <quote from article>
>
> All WFS windows and other multi-sprites are on a single Stage. MIAW (Movies In A
> Window) windows are on separate Stages. MIAW supports parent child relationships
> much like WFS does. But MIAW is unsupported in Shockwave. MIAW only works in
> Authoring and Projector run modes.
>
> If you want different Stages for windows in Shockwave pieces, they must be in
> different browser windows. They must be separate .DCR files. But then there are
> considerable problems getting windows to talk with one another easily and quickly,
> because of cross-browser, cross-platform Javascript issues. WFS is a solution for
> windowed Shockwave work.
>
> MIAW requires Lingo scripting whereas non-programmers can use the WFS drag and drop
> behaviors more easily. Some people therefore use WFS as a replacement for MIAW. But
> MIAW has features that WFS does not.

Yup. Windowing with Shockwave is supported only by Windows for Shockwave. There is no other
alternative unless you write it yourself, and I've spent about two years (on and off) on it. I
wanted that functionality for my art work, like you do. I wrote the Overview article because WFS
is a decent-sized project and it needed a good overview to give people a solid sense of it from
the outset.

There's a review of WFS, by the way, at http://mediamacros.com/item/item-1006687216 written by
Chuck Neal, who runs mediamacros.com, another great Director resources site.

Another interesting Director resources site that I've spent time at recently is
http://lingoworkshop.com run by Australia's Luke Wigley (I believe that is his real name). He's
a master of 'imaging Lingo', like Chuck Neal is. Flash is great at vector-based animation, but
Director is the thing for bitmap manipulation, and that's what 'imaging Lingo' is about.

If you look in the "Code" section of lingoworkshop.com and the "Testzone" sections, you see some
pretty impressive work in making fab interface elements. His menus, for instance, in the
"TestZone" section, are deluxe. So is the "Anim FX" page and other Anim FX pages in the "Code"
section.

This is really very high quality work. Not as 'art' but as 'tools'. I haven't seen much of
Luke's art; apparently he works mostly to installation (like most Director developers,
actually), not to Shockwave. The only problem with his tools is that how to use them isn't
conveniently documented, and it isn't strictly drag and drop; some coding is required, it seems.
But, as Luke says on his site, "The code and other resources provided here are not intended for
beginners."

A great introduction to imaging Lingo is at http://mediamacros.com/item/item-1006687089 . This
is one deluxe .DIR imaging Lingo (and dynamic sprite creation/destruction) lesson by Chuck Neal.

ja
http://vispo.com








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Bookmarked! Have you seen any work, articles, dealing with the individual control of tracks in Quicktime, not just the standard controls of the movie? I am primarily interested in the possible applicaiton of Director and Lingo in the display and coding of QTVR movies. This field struggles with limited functionality in QT and various Java-based viewers, like PTViewer, that work as applets. Problems abound due to the Java implementation on Windows. Some use Flash but due to slow actionscript and other things I am not too clear about, the results are pretty sluggish compared to a straight .mov. No one is talking about Director in this regard, and it seems to me, without having tried it, to be a better solution to create a standalone "player" with individually scripted features. Seen any words or examples of this?

-af

> Bookmarked! Have you seen any work, articles, dealing with the individual control of
> tracks in Quicktime, not just the standard controls of the movie? I am primarily
> interested in the possible applicaiton of Director and Lingo in the display and
> coding of QTVR movies. This field struggles with limited functionality in QT and
> various Java-based viewers, like PTViewer, that work as applets. Problems abound due
> to the Java implementation on Windows. Some use Flash but due to slow actionscript
> and other things I am not too clear about, the results are pretty sluggish compared
> to a straight .mov. No one is talking about Director in this regard, and it seems to
> me, without having tried it, to be a better solution to create a standalone "player"
> with individually scripted features. Seen any words or examples of this?

I haven't worked with it. But a search of http://www.macromedia.com/support/director/ yields
quite a bit of info:

http://www.macromedia.com/support/director/ts/documents/video_tt_sys_reqs_qtvr.htm
http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/search/index.cfm?area=support.director&loc=en_us&term=qtvr

i see lots of qtvr-containing subject lines at
http://listserv.uark.edu/scripts/wa.exe?S2=direct-l&q=&s=qtvr&f=&a=&b= . This is the Direct-L
list. Dirgames-L would be another one to try at
http://nuttybar.drama.uga.edu/mailman/listinfo/dirgames-l/

More generally, check out, say, http://vispo.com/lingo/windows/documentation/resources.htm for
an overview of what director resources exist (independent of qtvr).

when i was in toronto, a couple of students at centennial college were using QTVR and Director
(in part of one of the more ambitious projects among the students) to start up a business. they
wanted to be in the 'location data providing' end of the movie biz in toronto, you know, like
how does a movie company find the locations to shoot their movies on? part of the students'
project involved providing some QTVR over the web, as well as much other media and using
databases of it etc.

ja

http://vispo.com/lingo/Cnr.htm is a script i wrote for director developers.

C(n,r) calculates the number of combinations of n things taken r at a time.
C(n,r) = n! / ((n-r)!r!) = n(n-1)(n-2)…(n-r+1) / r!

P(n,r) calculates the number of permutations of n things taken r at a time.
P(n,r) = n! / (n-r)! = n(n-1)(n-2)…(n-r+1)

nFactorial(n) calculates n!.
n!=n(n-1)(n-2)…1

These functions are sometimes useful in working with combinatoria.

ja