Hi,
At 10:28 AM 4/29/2002 -0500, you wrote: >>I believe I have found the solution and it has nothing to do with >>library palettes or the PI. >> >>It was because I used the lingo command pause, so that the playback head >>was stopped. > >Yeah, that'll do it all right. Pause suspends *everything* including frame >or stage updates. What are frame updates? I searched the help in Director but could not find anything. When does one do a frame update? I found out about updateStage. I presume you are talking about this. The definition from help: 'Command; redraws the Stage immediately instead of only between frames.' Is it necessary to redraw the Stage immediately? And yet you write on page 409 that updateStage is there to force Director to refresh the screen. >>If the lingo command pause causes problems, why is this still being >>included in Director? > >It doesn't cause problems, actually; there are times when you want to >suspend all operations, such as when a MIAW has been backgrounded, >perhaps, and you don't want it eating processor cycles to refresh itself >when there's no reason for it to do so. When is a MIAW backgrounded? When it has finished playing? How does it eat processor cycles? >>>Actually I've gotten to the point that I don't use movie scripts at all >>>any more, but that's almost a philosophical thing as much as it is an >>>issue of programming approach. >> >>Philosophical ? That�s surprising. > >Is it? I don't know. All programming at this point is roughly on par with >the way furniture was manufactured 300 years ago. It's all done by hand, >one piece at a time, without anything like an assmbly line. I suppose now >we have some tools, analogues to lathes for instance, but for the most >part software is still very much a hand-crafted artifact. Thus you'll see >a lot of personal expression in it, and you will see a lot of passionate >discussion about philosophical perspectives, what's elegant, what's >baroque, and whether a stool should have three legs or four. > >OOP design is philosophical as much as it is anyhing else and I think I >can say with almost perfect confidence that in 50 years it won't even be >in use any more. I don't know what will replace it, but something will. OOP design? What I mean is I know that it is related to parent/ child scripts so the purpose is to go into complex programming isn't it? Actually, I think when you use the word philosophical do you mean the way things are being achieved or created and not so much a search for a general understanding of the values? >This is why programming can be so unfulfilling, if you want to define your >life around your work. (That's not a good idea anyway.) You have to >practice nonattachment to what you do. That's a rather difficult concept >for many to grasp, particularly the Western mind. Is this a difficult concept? After all, non attachment to all material things is the main thrust of the teachings of Buddhism, one of the major religions of the East. > But programs are very, very ephemeral, much more so than most other > products. Even automobiles are more likely to last longer than most programs. What is the average life span of a program? Not even five years? >>Something must have prompted you to provide the solution as using a movie >>script or maybe it was the way the module was written� > >More the latter than the former, yes. If there's a Dir9 rewrite I've >already decided I'm going to drop all references to movie scripts. So I studied about movie scripts for nothing? Is there nothing redeeming about them? >>I know that I should not have brought it up but when I was studying it, >>I did not understand why you provided the solution in this manner. > >Old-school application, actually. When I began using Director all we had >was movie scripts and macros. So I still tended to think in those terms >for introductory material until comparatively recently, when I realized >thet getting started in Director with an OOP framework made a hell of a >lot more sense than mentioning anything else. But by then the book had hit >the press. Do you recommend then that I should read module 12 first? Then module 13 , and work my way backwards? By the way, I am interested to use FileXtra3. To use it, I go to the Macromedia folder from C:\Program files. I go to the Director 8.5 folder to locate the Xtras folder. I place the FileXtra3 folder into this folder. I close this then I return to the Director program. When I open up Xtras which is between Control and Windows, it is not there. Have I done it correctly? Noelle [To remove yourself from this list, or to change to digest mode, go to http://www.penworks.com/lingo-l.cgi To post messages to the list, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Problems, email [EMAIL PROTECTED]). Lingo-L is for learning and helping with programming Lingo. Thanks!]
