Imaging and Behavior Lingo
- Imaging and Behavior Lingo
- Part 2 0f 8
- Part 3 0f 8
- Part 4 0f 8
- Part 5 0f 8
- Part 6 0f 8
- Part 7 0f 8
This article by Phil Gross, co-author with Jason Roberts of Director 8 Demystified, explains how to perform a smooth transition from one image to another.
This article is provided courtesy of Peachpit Press.
One of the new features that was added to Director 8 is the ability to directly modify images using Lingo. Director programmers can use this "imaging Lingo" to modify images of bitmap and text cast members, or even create images on the fly. Judicious use of manipulating images should help cut down on the size and number of images required for a Director movie, and ease the bandwidth problems typically found with Shockwave movies.
Imaging Lingo also opens up the possibility of creating types of movies that were previously either extremely difficult of even impossible. For example, you can create a paint program within Director that provides the user with drawing tools. The drawing is implemented by modifying the image, using Lingo, as the user draws. This sort of program has been impossible until now, since there was no way to include all the images needed to build all the possible drawings. If you look in the folder where you installed Director 8 you'll find an example of a simple drawing program-the file is called imaging.dir and is found in the Lingo Examples folder within the Learning folder.
Another example is the ability to create custom transitions, the example we will be using here. For the remainder of this article, we will use a pixalating or mosaic-type transition as a means of introducing you to elements of imaging Lingo. There is actually a similar (though more robust) transition included with Director 8 in the Sprite Transitions window of the Library Palette. The one supplied by Macromedia is undoubtedly less quirky and has more options, but for this learning exercise, we'll work through the process of creating one. Feel free, however, to browse the code that makes up Macromedia's version.