On Wed, 13 Oct 1999, David Bovill wrote:
> Thanks Scott. From this documentation I can see the following supported
> properties:
>
> fileName - the movie to play
> showController - show the controller bar
> alwaysBuffer - draw movie into its own buffer, which allows playing
> the movie behind other controls
> startTime, endTime - sets a selection
> showSelection - allows the user to see and edit a selection
> playSelection - play just the selected part of clip
> currentTime - get and set the current play time
> playRate - change playback speed and direction (set to -1 to reverse)
> callbacks - a return-delimited list of "time, message" format callbacks
> duration - the duration of a movie, in movie units (see timescale)
> timescale - the timescale of the move in units per second
> formattedWidth, formattedHeight - the natural size of the movie
> paused - get and set the paused state of the movie
>
> There appears to be no support therefore for sprites, QTVR and tracks.
We're just shooting for the basics in this release. This is partly
because when we called for participation in a discussion of what the
scripting language API for these other features would be, few people
contributed and few of those that contributed could offer more than
"check list item" reasons for why fine-grained control over these
things should be implemented.
> Perhaps you could support calls to QScript or similar in wired movies. This
> single feature would allow developers to have intimate control of all QT4
> features such as tracks, sprites, transitions, MIDI, samples, and QTVR, as
> developers could embed the interactivity into QT4 with a product such as
> LiveStage which MetaCard could then call.
Interactivity (including QTVR) should just work. You can't get any
information into or out of the movie from a script, but we haven't
seen any examples where this is essential (e.g., if you need
track-selecting support, you can build it into the movie). There are
lots of cases where having direct access to certain things in movies
could be useful, but QT has so many features that it's very difficult
to pick and choose what should be available from the scripting
language. Without better guidance, we'd inevitably waste a huge
amount of time implementing things that no one would use and probably
end up missing many of the features that would be truly useful.
> Oh yes, and then I could use MetaCard instead of Director -:)
A list of what Director features you're using that you can't do with
MetaCard + some QT authoring tool would be very useful to see. Even
better would be details on what the Lingo API for these things is and
how you'd recommend improving it for xTalk ;-)
Regards,
Scott
********************************************************
Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com
MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that...
