Director 7 Shockwave Internet Studio

Review first published by WindoWatch.com

This article covers the library, behaviours, and making a small shockwave movie.

The library palette

This palette allows you quick access to all the pre-programmed Director functions. Director allows you to set this so the palette shows only the graphic, only the text title of the function or both. I've left mine set to both for demonstration purposes.

Below is a list of the types of behaviours in the library.

Animation Automatic

This includes such animations as fade in/out, rotate continuously, rotate following a path, and colour cycling.

Animation Interactive

Have a sprite follow the mouse cursor, allow the user to change the shape of a graphic, and have a sprite change when the cursor moves over it.

Controls

Director's way of making buttons, and jumping between parts of your Director script easy. This includes dropdown lists and radio buttons.

Internet Forms

Form post fields, hidden fields, dropdown list and submit button. Director mentions that these are advanced functions (you need to know how to use HTML forms to use these.)

Internet Multiuser

Connects to a server, then has several functions useful for multiple user chats.

Internet Streaming

These functions include telling the movie how to behave while waiting for more of the movie to download, creating a progress bar to show how much is left to download, and when to jump to the next part of the movie.

Java behaviours

A group of behaviours appropriate to use if you wish to create a Java interaction instead of a Director shockwave or projector. This includes many of the same behaviours as does the regular Director - create buttons, jump to markers, rollovers, and Java text fields. If you need to create a Java program, you should be using these.

Media Flash

Set the click mode, playback quality or scale for Flash animations that you wish to include in the movie.

Media Quicktime

Create slider control for your Quicktime movie or create a control button.

Media Sound

Use this to play a sound file, have your program make a simple beep or play a sound member.

Navigation

Use this set of functions to jump between parts of your movie, or to jump to a URL or to loop through a part of the movie again. Jumping between parts of a movie is one of the things you'll want to do when you create anything more than a simple animation like using a button to go to a scrolling list of company employees.

Text

A number of behaviours for text, like creating a typewriter effect, creating a countdown timer or getting a password entry.

As you can tell from the list and brief descriptions, there is a lot that you can do with Director without knowing much of the detail on how it is done. Better yet though, as you use behaviours, they become part of your cast. Then you can edit them, if you wish, to behave slightly differently.

A demonstration

Now let's suppose I want to create an animated banner. First I get the elements of the banner together. I have a background and the title which has been split into two words. First I arrange them on the stage as I want the finished banner to look.

Now what I want is to make the first word zoom in and fade in. Then I want the second word to slide in from the right and fade in. So I open up the library and chose the animation automatic section. Then just drop and drop the desired effects onto the cast members on the stage. You can see by the image that you can pick how you want to set up the behaviour. Once you've dropped all the desired effects onto the movie, play it. If you don't like something, select the member in the score, then click the diamond (upper left box in the score). That will bring up all the behaviours set on a cast member. You can double click one to change it, or select one of them and press the delete key to remove that behaviour.

Is this all that you can do? No, not by a long shot. You could fade the cast member in by putting it in the score. Then change information about the member within the score itself, instead of using the library. I could also slide the second word in by placing the image in position for the start frame, then select the last frame for the word and change the position. Director would automatically take care of moving the image.

Conclusion

Director is capable of doing far more than this simple demonstration. Companies have made several games using Director as the development tool. It takes time, and the willingness to learn Director's Lingo to create something truly complex.