 | | | dynamic sprite creation and imaging lingo | dynamic sprite creation and imaging lingo 2003-11-29 - By Jim Andrews
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> You mentioned the presentation on the mediaMacros site, but
> did you see this
> article, also by Chuck Neal, on the devNet site?
>
> Imaging Lingo Basics:
> http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/mx/director/articles/imaging_lingo.html
No, hadn't seen that. Cool, thanks. That is very useful in conjuntion with
Chuck's presentation DIR.
> As for the arguments for or against dynamic sprites, I
> browsed the thread
> you referred to and I think the case was stated clearly. Going
> to the trouble
> of creating a 'sprite manager' really only becomes useful if you
> have very large
> numbers of sprites to deal with, such as in a tile based engine,
> or in a very
> large game level with lots of stuff going on. In my opinion, for the vast
> majority of small games and average multimedia projects it's
> probably overkill.
I would agree that dynamic sprite creation is for projects involving large
numbers of interactive sprites.
> I could go on to say that putting any effort at all into
> trying to 'defeat'
> the score with a buggy, undocumented and explicitly unsupported feature is
> counterproductive,
Everything used in dynamic sprite creation is documented, actually. If you
look in the Lingo Dictionary, you'll find puppetSprite, for instance. It
isn't buggy, Jerry, unless you use it improperly, as Rasmus states. Some
people make the intial mistake of puppeting channels that contain, at some
point in the Score, a static sprite. Others make later mistakes. It is not
in the test suite, however. I'm not sure what is not in the test suite,
actually. Like is some puppeting of sprites in the test suite but not an
exhaustive test of setting properties and all the rest? Macromedia has not
said much about it, just a kind of blanket statement. It would be useful to
have them say more about the matter. And they should put it in the test
suite, because an alternative to the current methods of dynamic sprite
creation is simply not likely to ever happen, from what I've heard.
> especially if your only justification is to
> achieve some sort
> of mythical 'pure code' environment. However, since that will
> probably only
> antagonize the 'purists', I won't go into that.
The goal does not concern the creation of a 'pure code' environment. The
goal is to be able to create Director projects which require a large number
of interactive sprites (ie, with mouse events associated with them) that
don't slow to a crawl via too many sprites.
> Anyway, that whole argument was rendered completely moot by
> the advent of
> Imaging Lingo(IL). With the ability to manipulate image objects
> in RAM and copy
> them directly to the stage you don't need sprites at all, puppet
> or otherwise.
> Mouse events are a different story, and I would guess that's why
> most IL demos
> use at least one sprite.
Clearly IL is very useful for image production and filtering. Luke Wigley's
work also shows that it is promising concerning the production of
interactive entities like menus and scrollable windows (
http://www.lingoworkshop.com/Testzone/testzone.asp ). Just how customizable
these are, in their look, is not clear to me. And how you could develop a
highly customizable product for IL menus (and other stuff) is not clear to
me (yet), having not really taken the dive into IL. I've developed a set of
sprite-based behaviors called Windows for Shockwave at http://vispo.com/wfs4
for creating windows and menus and, more generally, multi-sprites and
families of them. None of this relies on dynamic sprite creation. But you
can use dynamic sprite creation very easily with them via scripts I've
written for version 4.0. Works great. No bugs remaining that I know of.
> Personally, I rarely need to use IL except in cases where I'm
> trying to
> achieve a visual effect that would be difficult (or impossible)
> with sprites, or
> in cases where a large number of sprites would be much too slow.
> An excellent
> example of just such a case is available in an article I wrote
> for Director
> Online:
>
> http://www.director-online.com/buildArticle.php?id=1115
Cool. My introductory IL work is at
http://turbulence.org/curators/Paris/introandrewsenglish.htm in both the
interactive quads in the graphic at the top and the puzzle at the bottom of
the page. Both of those IL pieces are adaptations of some of Chuck Neal's
stuff in his IL tutorial.
ja
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