Dials (for Director Developers)

This message is specifically for people using Macromedia Director.

I suspect many have had to create dials before. I have developed some
general use dials and am writing to see if there are people interested in
testing them and commenting on them. You get a free copy of the code. They
might end up being free anyway, not sure at this point. Comments on their
salability would also be welcome.

Generally dials control sprite properties or things like sound channel
properties such as volume. But of course one may want dials to control other
quantities that aren't either of the above. The dials let you do any of
these things nicely with a specifiable granularity. Also, when the user
cranks on the dial, the dial's values change quickly. But when the user
fusses with a dial, the change can happen slower, with specifiable
granularity.

Dials control properties and data, but sometimes we also want sprites or
other objects to send messages to dials. For instance, if one dial is meant
to control the framerate of several videos, we may want it so that when a
video is clicked (most recently selected), the framerate dial controls only
the framerate of the most recently clicked video, rather than controlling
the framerate of all the videos. The dials support this sort of
functionality also.

Further, we may want sprites to update dials continually or continuously.
For instance, if we have a dial that lets us adjust the temporal location of
the playback head of a video, the dial should change value as the video
plays. The dials support this sort of functionality also.

You can see a 'rough draft' of the documentation at
http://vispo.com/lingo/dial . There are links from there to a Shockwave demo
involving 9 scenes.

Please backchannel me ( jim at vispo.com) if you're interested in testing
them.

Thanks, and happy hoho.

ja
http://vispo.com