At 11:48 AM +1300 10/18/01, Sean Wilson wrote: >My point was that, IMO, the ability to "Wait for ..." shouldn't have been >added, or should have come with the warning message that "If you utilise >this feature your frame-rate will turn to molasses, regardless of what your >'frame clock' is set to." > >As evidenced, new users have trouble understanding what went wrong.
If one sets the Tempo (frame rate) slow, Director's animations go slow - I really don't see the confusion in this (see below) >-Sean. So here's some history & answers (I hope). SOME HISTORY: Director was initially a cell animation program. In cell animation (like cartoons), it's more important to see each cell (image) than it is for exact time to be kept between them. This is why Director's frame rate changes. Director works hard to show you each frame. As Kerry indicated, the Tempo (frame rate) that one sets up in the Control Panel (or the Tempo channel) is only a desired value. Director tries to give that rate, but changes to accommodate the images or any hardware limitations (I've never been able to get 999 fps ... yet). If there's a new large image needs to be drawn, or there's a lot of sprites changing (positions, blends, colors, etc.), then the Tempo will have to slow down to make sure that you see all these changes. IMPORTANT TIP: when you play a movie, Director writes the actual frame rates into the score for each frame. If you play, then stop, then use the step backward button, you will see these numbers displayed (as italics) beneath the desired rate. In this way, one can find a frame which has caused a huge tempo drop and apply tricks like preloading any big media that needs to be newly displayed in that frame, so that when the plauhead gets to that frame, Director will only have to display them on the stage & not be burdened with also having to load them into memory (from the cast). PUBLISHING TIP: When publishing titles, it's important to set the Tempo close to the actual frame rate & then set the Lock Frame Durations checkbox in the Modify > Movie > Playback dialog. WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT: if you don't do this, then when someone hits your movie (a few years from now) on that Pentium 17 that's running at 700 gHz, if you had left the Tempo setting at 999, but everything looked 'right' at the actual 17 you were getting, your movie will blast by this future viewer in a micro-second. MORE HISTORY: Several of the 'Wait-for' choices in the Tempo dialog are there to help synchronize time-based media (sound & quicktime) to the score. The time-based media keeps 'perfect' time (duh!) & as we have noticed, the playhead does not, so this was a way of catching stuff up. In order to see a simple case of why/how this was necessary, try this: Set the Tempo to 10, fill 30 frames with animations & spread a 3 second sound sprite over the same 30 frames. The animations and the sound almost never finish together. The wait-for mouse click (or keypress) was probably added because it makes it really easy to create read-this-then-click types of page sequences. hth -Buzz [To remove yourself from this list, or to change to digest mode, go to http://www.penworks.com/LUJ/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!]
