Category: Director

In the spring of 1996, when I was writing my first book and the Web was young, I posed a question in WIRED magazine: “How are we going to find stuff?” Particularly, how are we going to be able to search multimedia formats like Java applets, PDF files, and Shockwave movies? (Flash movies hadn’t made their appearance yet.)

Within a couple of years of my brief article, the better search engines had incorporated PDF parsing engines. For most other formats, the answer was to use meta tags in the headers of the enclosing HTML document that contained text for search engines to index. But — depending on who you talk to &mdash meta tags are obsolete, and their content is no longer indexed by Google or any of the remaining major search engines.

I don’t know what the answer is. I’ve always thought the various people selling their “services” to “tune” your web site and get it ranked higher on search engines were a fraud, precisely because much smarter people at companies like Google worked to make their systems more efficient and less prone to “gaming”.

But the question remains (and came up in a DIRECT-L thread titled “dcr, swf and google” initiated by Quixadá) of just how we can easily get text from our DCR and SWF movies into the memory banks.

In one of those perennial discussions/comparisons of Director and other development systems that seem to stem from some college student’s project, Brennan Young makes some pertinent points about writing Xtras, game development, the Havok Xtra, and more.

Daniel Plaenitz writes today on DIRECT-L (in a message titled “DMX2004 windows appData path quirk”) that DMX2004 uses a hard-coded (English-language) path to place the configuration settings, rather than determining from the system where the appropriate place would be in localized Windows systems. (He doesn’t address the Mac version.) His concern is that other modules use the correct path, e.g. the activation module. Good detective work, Daniel!

A message on a Flash list posed the question of whether there was any way to dynamically generate a posterized version of a bitmap image in Director. My response: “Nothing could be simpler.”

The following movie script takes an image object and applies the built-in Web 216 palette to the picture without dithering, which results in a fair amount of posterization. Using a more restricted palette would result in more dramatic effects.

on posterize imageRef
  memberRef = new (#bitmap)
  posterizedImage = image (imageRef.rect.width, imageRef.rect.height, 8, #web216)
  posterizedImage.copyPixels (imageRef, imageRef.rect, imageRef.rect)
  memberRef.image = posterizedImage
end

You can see the results of this script here (click to open up a larger version):

To execute the script, if you’ve got a bitmap image in cast member position 1, you just type “posterize member (1).image” in the Message window.

The first command creates a new cast member for the posterized bitmap.

The second command assigns an image object to a variable, using the size of the original image, setting the color depth of the posterized image, and specifying a palette to use.

The third command copies the original image into the image object.

Finally, the image object is assigned to the image property of the new member.

To make the third version of the original image in the JPG, I just substituted a 4 for the 8 in the third parameter of the image function, to make it 16-color instead of 256-color. For more control over the colors of the posterization, you can create a custom palette and substitute its member reference for the fourth parameter. There are all other sorts of effects you can do automatically using copyPixels, including things like inverting the brightness of the colors. If you’re not in a hurry, it’s certainly possible to do a pixel-by-pixel processing of the image.

You can download the source file (compatible with Director 8.5 and later) here.

In those hazy days back before the Web, the name Marvyn Hortman rose high in the Director community. Marvyn set up an FTP site where developers could post tutorials, samples, and information in an era (only a decade ago) when getting up-to-date material wasn’t exactly easy.

Late last Saturday night, Marvyn and his neighbor came home late and just missed running into a bank robber who’ been featured that night on America’s Most Wanted. The fugitive, Terence Washington, stole the neighbor’s Hummer and headed off into the night.

Marvyn reports that a camera crew from AMW was due to interview him and his neighbor Friday, and it should air as a lead story on Saturday, March 20.

Robert Tweed of Killing Moon Software has updated his list of Director-related links. A good way to kill part of the weekend.

Haven’t determined whether I’m going to make it this year, but if you’re attending the Game Developers Conference 2004 — or if you’re just in the San Jose area on March 26 — Brian Robbins announced the meeting time and place for the annual gathering of Director/Shockwave and Flash game developers.

Most of the show’s oriented toward the big-time console and computer-based markets, but a number of folks from our community, including Brian and Gray Rosenzweig, regularly present at the conference (see my article at DOUG on last year’s dinner).

Brian says to meet up from 4-5PM, Friday, March 26 at the IGDA booth outside the main entrance to the Expo hall at the San Jose Convention Center (you don’t need a pass to get that far). It’s a great way to meet people who love to play and develop (and sell) games!

Years ago, I thought I was pretty cool for knowing enough about PostScript to be able to write a tool to import simple EPS and PostScript files into Director as vector shape data (PS2VS).

Now that I’m old and all of my creativity has dried up, I can only look admiringly on as people move into areas I thought about but never managed to explore. Specifically, Daniel Nelson and Valentin Schmidt, who have both posted code demos and libraries showing how to generate PDF files with Lingo.

Check out Daniel’s BlueJade demo page or download Valentin’s latest PDF Class library.

P.S. Valentin also has a Windows-only PDF-creation Xtra!

P.P.S. Daniel’s got a set of vector shape import scripts that beat PS2VS on speed, too.

Christophe Leske’s posted commands for giving MX2004 on OS X a metal look, and for opening specific help topics.

A thread on DIRECT-L came up wondering about a handler that could draw a vector shape circle of a specific size. This little knock-off script is just reverse-engineered from a circle drawn with the vector shape tools.

on createVectorCircle diameter
  vs = new (#vectorshape)
  radius = diameter / 2.0
  rhsqh = radius * sqrt (0.5)
  cpoffset = rhsqh * 0.5625
  vs.vertexlist = [[#vertex: point(-rhsqh, -rhsqh), \
                    #handle1: point(cpoffset, -cpoffset), \
                    #handle2: point(-cpoffset, cpoffset)], \
                   [#vertex: point(rhsqh, -rhsqh), \
                    #handle1: point(cpoffset, cpoffset), \
                    #handle2: point(-cpoffset, -cpoffset)], \
                   [#vertex: point(rhsqh, rhsqh), \
                    #handle1: point(-cpoffset, cpoffset), \
                    #handle2: point(cpoffset, -cpoffset)], \
                   [#vertex: point(-rhsqh, rhsqh), \
                    #handle1: point(-cpoffset, -cpoffset), \
                    #handle2: point(cpoffset, cpoffset)]]
  vs.closed = true
end