MACROMEDIA DIRECTOR MX 2004-USING DIRECTOR, Use Manual, Page: 441 / 500

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CHAPTER 22
Managing and Testing Director Projects
As you work with Macromedia Director MX 2004 and develop projects with it, you might
encounter some situations where a seemingly small change in the design of a project has a
significant effect on the organization of the Director files and media files associated with it. A
little bit of planning before you start a Director project can help avoid difficult changes during the
course of development. 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
By carefully managing the resources that go into your 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.
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
By establishing the final organization of your files before you import them into Director, you
prevent the need to update links later in the project.
•
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.