Daniel Plaenitz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote
> http://brennan.young.net/Edu/Lingvad.html
> Try if it fits your needs.
Thanks for sending more more folks my way, Daniel, (Heh heh heh. One
puff and they'll soon be in my grasp!) but FWIW, the Invadirs tutorial
does not deal with parent scripts explicitly.
What it does do is use OO terminology for understanding and scripting
behaviors, so it might help in accommodating the abstraction of parent
scripts, the concept of inheritance and so on.
I recognised the need for a knowledge path from behaviors to parent
scripts after Director 6 had been out for about a year, and even made an
early stab at some kind of article about it.
http://brennan.young.net/Edu/CAI.html
This was ultimately supposed to be glued on the end of the Invadirs
tutorial. Two years on, and that article has not moved further than the
original blastula stage. It stops just as it's getting interesting.
Sorry about that.
The important thing is not so much understanding parent scripts - as
Jakob and others have pointed out, behaviors are almost the same thing,
just with all the initialisation/destruction handled for you.
What's really useful with parent scripts is that they are abstract (in
the way that behaviors tend to be 'visual'), and of course, the
principles of inheritance are most usefully borne out with parent scripts.
In the old days (before behaviors) Lingo Sorcery was 'the bible' on
parent scripts. Reading it again today, I get the impression that it's
really not as useful a book as its reputation might suggest. It happened
to be at the right place at the right time, filling a vast void in
information on OO lingo with a refreshing and inspiring (underground?)
style but it also is rather let down by its idiosyncracies, and the
order in which the various topics are handled. (Anyway, we all know that
Peter is a bit of a fruitcake ;).
Lingo Sorcery is excellent for shaking up the timeline + movie scripts
approach, if there's anyone still operating in that fashion, but
considerably less useful if you're already comfortable with writing
behaviors.
Now I'm convinced that understanding the scripting of behaviors, to the
level of being able to manipulate the scriptinstancelist of a sprite a
little, is the best route for entering the mindset of parent scripts
today. Working with Xtras, such as fileIO is another good way to
understand the concept of abstract objects.
There's definitely a need for some kind of "Inheritance for behavior
authors" article, so that those who came to OO lingo through behaviors
can start creating really elaborate data structures.
These days, I have a three month old child object at home, which needs
milk and other input parameters (not to mention the output), so my time
for such projects is limited.
I have a collection of links here, which may or may not be useful:
http://brennan.young.net/Edu/OOThink.html
--
_____________
Brennan Young
Artist, Composer and Multimedia programmer
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"I suppose if I'm honest, I use my penis as a sort of car substitute."
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