MACROMEDIA DIRECTOR MX-USING DIRECTOR MX, Use Manual

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Chapter 2 88
3
On the Stage, click the Animation button to select it. Use the Sprite tab in the Property
inspector (Windows > Property Inspector), as you did earlier, to give the button x- and y-
coordinates of
220 and 298 , respectively.
Note: As you complete the tutorial, remember to save your work frequently.
Each scene of your movie is graphically complete. You are now ready to add Lingo to the buttons,
to let users navigate through the movie.
Write Lingo scripts to control movie playback
With the Lingo scripting language, you can implement almost any kind of user interaction and
multimedia effect that you can imagine. You can use Lingo to make simple buttons function, as
you will soon do in this tutorial. You can also use Lingo for more complex tasks, including
controlling every aspect of a movie’s content without using the Score.
Lingo is designed to be easy to learn, so don’t be intimidated. After you know the basic concepts,
you can use the extensive Lingo vocabulary to control anything in your movie. For a detailed
introduction to Lingo, see Chapter 16, “Writing Scripts with Lingo,” on page 385.
You’ll now add Lingo to a special script channel in the Score and to your button sprites. You’ll
start with scripts that control the playhead.
Loop the playhead with Lingo
The scenes of your movie aren’t much good as scenes if the playhead simply races through them
without stopping to let the user absorb their content. The playhead needs to stay in one scene
until the user makes a decision to go to a different scene.
To make the playhead stay in one scene, you loop it in a single frame or a series of frames. For the
start scene and the sound and video scene, the playhead can loop in one frame. For the animation
scene, where the animation occurs over a series of frames, the playhead should loop over the same
series of frames.
To control the movement of the playhead without using buttons, you use the script channel in
the Score. As with the sound channels, the script channel is one of the effects channels that appear
above the frame number bar in the Score.
The start scene is the first one that needs a script to loop the playhead. Each time the playhead
leaves one frame to go to the next, an event, called an
exitFrame
event, occurs. In this case, the
word event refers to an action executed in Director. Your first script will use the
exitFrame
event
as its trigger.
When you need to enter or edit scripts in Director, you use the Script window. Each script
becomes a cast member the same as all the other elements that play a role in your movie. The
Script window contains tools for editing scripts easily.
Script channel