Gross, Chapters 8, 13, and 15

Chapter 8

• What Flash calls a movie clip Director calls a Film Loop: a component object with its own animated behavior. Film loops in Director lack one crucial feature of Flash movie clips -- you can't edit their timelines once they have been defined -- but in other respects they are very similar.
  
  
• P. 172: Create a film loop by cutting and pasting a sequence of frames from the Score into an empty slot in the Cast.
  
  
• P. 173: Film loops pre-empt sound channel 1 even when they have no sound to play.
  
  
• P. 177: You may duplicate an entire movie by selecting all its component frames and pasting them into the first frame of the first channel used by the movie you are duplicating (in the example here, the Tempo channel).
  
  
• P. 180: A behavior is attached to an instance of a button (a sprite in the Score). Behaviors can also be attached more generally (to a cast member) or more specifically (to a particular frame within a sprite). The choice depends on how generally you want the behavior to apply.
  
  
• P. 185: Note the tip about using the Behavior Inspector on an unoccupied cell, unless you want to assign new behavior to specific sprites.

Note About Chapters 9 and 10

These chapters were not assigned. If you try them you may discover that some of the Controls to which Gross refers are not installed in the Educational version of Director. These Controls consist of pre-built scripts. The scripts in question exist as part of the finished version of the project, at least for Chapter 9. If you extract the relevant script from the finished version, you can complete at least that exercise on your own.

Note About Chapters 11 and 12

There are no technical problems with these chapters. They cover visual effects -- alpha channels, masks, and palettes -- which have already been introduced in earlier chapters and which aren't strictly necessary for what we're doing here. If you have time, these chapters are worth a look, though.

Chapter 13

• In this chapter you'll learn techniques that will be required for Assignment 4: interactive branching and navigation.
  
  
• P. 291: A good demonstration of the difference between cast member objects and particular instances.
  
  
• P. 299: A single script may contain multiple handlers.
  
  
• P. 301: Since markers are coordinated with frames, you can use a marker name to refer to a frame.
  
  
• P. 302: Frame scripts run without user action (as in Flash).
  
  
• P. 303: You can refer to markers by order ("relative markers") as well as by name. Marker(0) indicates the current marker, while marker(-1) is the one to the left and marker(1) is the one to the right. This allows you to write generalized scripts that control transitions without referring to specific markers.
  
  
• P. 307: Go and Go to are interchangeable.

Chapter 15

• This chapter introduces Shockwave, which you'll need to produce your movies for Assignment 3.
  
  
• Gross recommends stages "smaller than 640x480 pixels" for Shockwave. As he explains, this suggestions stems from limitations of client machines and Web browsers, not Shockwave itself.
  
  
• p. 342: Note the difference between the Paint Window and Tool Palette in Director: the former is a bitmap (raster) tool, while the latter lets you create vector graphics. Vector graphics are preferable for Internet work because they require much less information.
  
  
• P. 343: Note that there are two different versions of Shockwave for Windows -- an ActiveX version for Internet Explorer and a version written in some other programming language for Netscape Navigator. For this reason, it's best to visit the Shockwave site once with each browser to perform the download. This problem doesn't apply to Macintoshes, which can't run ActiveX -- but generally speaking the Shockwave plugins for Macs don't work as well as their Windows counterparts.
  
  
• For development and peer review, I expect you to have the current version of the Shockwave plugin installed in your browser. To check the status of your Shockwave installation, go to http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/welcome. If you can't configure your home system properly you'll have to use the machines in the Hypermedia Room.
  
  
• P. 345: All sounds in a Shockwave movie are compressed with the same setting.
  
  
• P. 345: Gross recommends external Shockwave Audio (see previous week) for extended sounds such as audio backgrounds.
  
  
• P. 346: Note that bit rate is not the same thing as the sampling rate of your sound source. Bit rate refers to how many bits of information stream through the Internet per second.
  
  
• Shockwave movies have the extension .dcr.
  
  
• P. 348: Select the Generate HTML option in Shockwave export to obtain markup with the proper <OBJECT> and <EMBED> containers. Note that you'll have to extract the containers from this generated page for Assignment 3, since it asks you to include your Shockwave movie in another page.
  
  
• P. 349: Use the Modify>Movie>Playback settings to allow or circumvent streaming of your Shockwave movie. Use the Play While Downloading option if you want the movie to stream. Generally speaking, Shockwave movies should stream. De-select this option only if streaming proves impossibly problematic.