Director 6 Demystified is a comprehensive guide to using Director, Lingo, and Shockwave to produce sophisticated animations and movies. The author starts out by explaining the Director interface and then teaches you how to create a simple animation and a screen saver. Next she shows you how to create a simple movie using sound and tempo control parameters; add interactivity in the form of buttons, looping, and nonlinear navigation; and create a projector, which is a stand-alone application. The author also helps you create special visual effects in Director's Paint window; use Photoshop plug-ins with Director; build and use color palettes; and use advanced display, Score, Sprite, and search features.
The next section of Director 6 Demystified covers Lingo. It teaches you the elements of scripting and how to create interactive movies with user feedback and control, cursor commands, behaviors, authoring-level Lingo, multiple movies and casts, lists, parent/child objects, audio files, video files, and Xtras and XObjects. Other topics include how to debug and troubleshoot your movies; manage memory, graphics, and other elements; and prepare your work for CD-ROM and cross-platform mastering. The book also explains how to create a Lingo-driven animation, an artificial intelligence-based interactive game, a floppy-based brochure, a screen saver, a cross-platform CD-ROM, and a video game.
The last section of the book focuses on using Shockwave to prepare your Director movies for the Web. You also learn how to use Streaming Shockwave, Streaming Lingo, Shockwave Audio, and NetLingo, which consists of network-related Lingo commands. Each chapter ends with a Points to Remember section that sums up everything covered.
Appendices list Director resources on the Internet, Lingo elements and codes, keyboard shortcuts, third-party Xtras, and Xtra and XObject internal references. A CD-ROM features clip media, Director movies, Xtras, XObjects, typefaces, and demo versions of many commercial and shareware software programs.
Director 6 Demystified gives you an approach to learning Director, Lingo, and Shockwave that's not only well organized but also highly technical. It is useful for repeated reference as you increase your knowledge of the program.
Whenever Macromedia puts out an update to Director, its top-of-the-line multimedia authoring software, Roberts updates his book, and he always does an excellent job. Director 6 is significantly different from Director 5, and this book will be useful both for those who are total newbies to multimedia authoring and for advanced users moving from older versions. An excellent book for all new-media designers.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
