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Chapter 23: Managing and Testing
Director Projects
By carefully managing the resources that go into your Adobe
®
Director
®
movies, you can avoid problems that might
arise when you make changes to the movie or change the location of the movie file or its linked media. Good testing
practices can help you discover problems early in the project while they are still small and easily remedied.
This chapter provides a few simple guidelines that can streamline your development process.
Managing Director projects
The following guidelines can help make your project go smoothly:
•
Before you begin a project, plan where media should be located when you deploy your movie, and replicate that
organization at the beginning of your project. This prevents the links between your Director movies and external
media files from being broken when you move the project to a different location on a disk or to a different disk
volume.
The following structure is a good example of a simple file organization:
Project Directory
contains:
MyDirectorMovie.dir
Linked_Media subdirectory
contains:
sound files
graphic files
digital video files
other linked assets
•
When you work on a large project, plan your basic approach to all aspects of the movie before you start
construction. This way, you can find problems with your strategies before you have invested a lot of time building
on them. Finding problems early in a project makes them much easier to solve.
•
Organize the cast members in a logical way. You might choose to group all the cast members of a particular type
together, or you might choose to group the cast members from each scene together. Choose a system that works for
you and that will make it easy to find cast members when your cast becomes large. You can also choose to keep
groups of cast members in separate casts.
•
Use the name of the cast member, sprite, or frame marker when referring to these items in scripts. This avoids
the need to change your code if you need to rearrange cast members, sprites, or frames during the project.
For example, the following script refers to a cast member by its number:
member(16).text = "Good planning makes Director projects easy."
If the text cast member 16 has to be moved in the cast, the script becomes invalid.
Instead, use the following script:
member("Output_text").text = "Good planning makes Director projects easy."
