Tutorial in Using Macromedia Director's Lingo Authoring Environment for Exprimental Arts

What is Director?

1.  Multimedia 2-D Animation:  It is a 2-D multimedia animation program that allows you to create or import images and sounds and orchestrate their movement over time.  This is accomplished by creating image, text, and audio cast members and placing them on a timeline based score that controls their motion and appearance.

2.  Interactive Multimedia Navigation:  Director allows you to divide the score up into sections indicated by markers.  It allows your to create buttons, hypertext, and hot images that control the navigation among areas of the score.  It has built in behaviors that allow you to link user actions such as rolling over an image or clicking a mouse button to movement to particular sections.

3  Lingo programming support:  Director incorporates a programming language which gives you many of the capabilities available in full languages such as C, Pascal, or BASIC.  The language is fully integrated with the multimedia capabilities such as digital video so that you can create much more complex possibilities than are available with the simple navigation behaviors.  To use it, however, you must learn the fundamentals of the Lingo language.  Learning Lingo is the focus of this tutorial.

4. Director as control center:  Director is extensible via special added software capabilities called Xtras and Xcmds.  For example with appropriate Xtras (and in some cases hardware), Director can be used to control speech synthesis and recognition, sensors and robotic devices, 3-D animations, and MIDI synthesizers.  Most recently extensive Internet capabilities have been added so that Director can control web browsers or incorporate information fetched from the Web.  Saving interactive Director movies in Shockwave format allows them to be sent out over the Web and appear within Web pages.
 

Basic Components of Director

How Does Lingo Work?

Lingo and Director have enormous possiblities but not everything is possible. Learning Lingo means learning  the range of possibilities it possess, learning the special vocabulary of words it understands, learning the appropriate syntax for expressing your ideas, and learning the logical organization of Lingo and multimedia components necessary to create your events.  Computer languages require absolute precision of expression.  One word misspelled or an extra comma will cause errors and stop your program cold.  This inflexibility is one thing that throws many artists in learning the language.

Artistic Challenge of Working with a Limited System

What Kind of Events does Lingo understand?

What kind of events does Lingo understand?  What user actions can be used to set up events?  What self induced, non user actions can it work with?  The first prerequiste for working with Lingo artisically is knowing what possibilities exist - what actions can it respond to and what are possibilities for what it can do with image, sound, text, and digital video.  The list below shows specific Lingo messages, commands and functions that you would need to tap into these possiblities.  Don't worry if you don't understand the words in the parentheses; they are examples of Lingo that relate to the events and will become clearer later.  Many detailed tutorial examples are offered after the list.

User Action

Movement of the mouse pointer - entering, staying within, and leaving the boundaries of an image sprite. ( mouseEnter, mouseWithin, mouseLeave)
Clicking the mouse button while pointing at something, double clicking (mouseDown, mouseUp, stillDown, hyperlinkClicked, mouseUpOutside, clickLoc, clickOn)
Location of the mousepointer on the screen (functions called the mouseLoc, mouseH (horizontal), and mouseV (vertical)
Entering text in a text entry field (the text of member "example")
Which keyboard keys are pressed (keyDown, keyUp. controlDown, optionDown, shiftDown, the key)
Grabbing and dragging an image sprite on the screen, contact between images (sprite 1 itersects sprite 2)
Opening, closing, moving, and deactivating windows (openWindow, closeWindow, moveWindow).
The starting or stopping of the movie (startMovie, stopMovie, preparemovie)
 

System Events

The passing of time since an action (the lastClick,  lastKey, lastEvent, lastRoll, the timer, the ticks)
The time of day or date  (the date, the time)
The movement of movie to different frames of the score (enterFrame, exitFrame)
The movement of a movie to the place a sprite exists (beginSprite, endSprite, prepareSprite)
A idle event Director continuously sends while it is running (Idle)
The touching or enclosure of image sprites (within, intersects)
The movement of a sound or digital movie past cue points
The status of a sound soundBusy(x)
The status of a digital movie (the movieTime)
 

What Can You Control in Lingo

Location of images (hloc,vloc)
Size and crop of images (the rect, crop)
Color of images (backColor, foreColor)
Replacement images ( the member of sprite x)
Visibility of images (the visible of sprite x)
Degree of transparency of images (the blend of sprite x)
Ink of image- for example opaque, reverse, invert, OR (the ink of sprite)
Palette of image
Orientation (horizontal and vertical flip, rotation, layering)
Shape and vertexes of vector images
Button style
User movability

Interface features
Appearance of the cursor
Custom menus and menuitems

Sound
Play a sound, stop, pause (sound playfile, sound stop)
Control volume (fadeIn, fadeOut, the volume of a sound)
beep

Text
Control location of text, movement, size, font, style, alignment, color, hilight
Scroll text (by line, page)
Appearance of text box (border, boxDropShadow)
Manipulate text by character, word, item, line User editability
Generate alert boxes

Digital video
Start, stop, pause, move to particular time points (movieTim
The size of window, crop, location, mask
The speed of movie, direction of play
The status of sound in the movie, the volume
Control of quicktimeVR movies

Navigation and timing of movie
Move to frames (by marker, next, previous)
Halt, pause, continue, stop the flow of the movie
Change the tempo of a movie
Change the transitions between frames

Mathematical and Data Functions
add, subtract, divide, multiply, sine, cosine, tan, integer, round, log, sqrt, max, min
random
number of items (strings, lists)
manipulate ordered lists, find items, sort, attach properties, locate items

Net
Dowload items from the Web
Control a browser
Monitor progress
 

Introductory Examples

Where do you put scripts?

• Attach them to cast members if you want that cast member to create that action whenever it appears in a movie - for example, a go back to beginning arrow.
• Attach a script to a sprite when you only want it to apply for a cast member during certain parts of a movie or when it will have different effects at different times - for example, a "hear more" button that would play different sounds in different sections.
• Attach a script to the frame level when they must monitor many sprites or user actions that could happen in many places or watch for system actions - for example, watching for two sprites intersecting, or a sound finishing or cumulating user actions.
• Attach a script to the movie level when it is spreads over many frames - for example, actions that should happen when a movie starts or timer events.

Some specific examples - Wilson Tutorials

General

List of Lingo Commands - arranged by category
Guide to Basic Animation Capabilities of Director

Marker navigation demo    Using Lingo to set up navigation using markers and sections of the score.
Lingo control of sprite visual appearance demo (change size, location, ink, rotation,blend, visibility and change image when rollover)
Lingo control of text field properties (font, fontsize, fontstyle,color) and dynamic placement of text in field from user input
Pause and continue demo   Controls the flow of animation using variable to pause and continue.

Sound, Speech

Sound manipulation (image of handout) - play background sound and pause while sounds plays via rollover of other sprites, sound activated when sprite reaches particular place of the screen,  activate sound only when sprites intersect, change volume based on where mouse is inside of a sprite, activate sound when animation reaches a certain point, activate automatically without user action.  (zip version of acutal sound manipulation Director Movie and associated sound files)
Speech Commands - synthesized speech commands (in Director MX only)
Sound Demo (revised)   General Principles, Controlling animation by sound, activating sound by user motion, Activating Sound by User Movement, reading collisions, Director 8 sound commands
Multiple simultaneous sounds - plays several sounds simultaneously - rolling in and out of buttons makes sounds audible and inaudible
Repeal loop sound  - sequence sounds and random sounds from a list - alternative exit frame method not use repeat loops

Lingo - randomness, mouse movement tracking, storing user actions, repeat command, user input

Text manipulation (image of handout)  - take user input into other members, rotate text, increase size of text, speak user input, scroll text in moving message, start and stop scrolling, random generation of sentences from list of words, activate automatically wihout user action (zip version of actual text manipulation Director Movie)
Using the random function - uses random to control rotation, word in text field, font of the text, and sound that is played
if.choice.demo.html  - Check if buttons have been clicked 3 times, check if each button has been clicked at least once, check if sound is done before playing, check if 2 sprites intersect before playing sound
3 property demo.  Shows dynamic assignment of graphic cast members and text to moving sprites.  a412.3prop.demo.gif
fontsize   Shows the dyamic control of the font and size of text.
Mouse fontsize demo   The size of text changes dynamically with movements of the mouse
Mouse follow demo     A sprite follows the movements of the mouse.
Repeat Demo   Shows how to control movement and other actions using repeat structure
Opinion Storing Demo   Shows how to store and access text that users type

More complex demos - games, time, web control

Urgency.mole2.dir - demonstrates how to create an elapsed time and countdown time function. Lingo can be used in many kinds of movies  This sample moves a ball down to indicate time and indicates in text field elapsed and remaining time.  Also demonstrates a moving mole game which the user has to try to click.  If user succeeds movie goes to success frame; if time runs out goes to failure frame.  Also shows lingo  to check if user dragged ball into a box.  text version to paste into script window   zipped version of the director movie

Game Demos - simple capture game, memory game, card game, board game
Shockwave movie as alternative browser (using netlingo to let movie access web pages, methods of setting up frames)
Time Demo  Shows how to use the date and time functions Text version for pasting time.movie.sit  time movie.zip
Urgency.time.demo  Shows how to use duration lingo comands  Text version for pasting urgency.siturgency.zip
Timeurldemo  - Access web pages every 15 seconds, other actions at intervals, act at specific second
urgencyboxmove.txt -  user is challenged to drag 3 objects into a box before the timing object falls below a certain level (paste the text into an exitframe script - create the needed sprites)

CIA  sound resource links

Director On-Line Resource

http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/director/ - director stuff
http://www.shocker.com/digests/index.html - shockwave email news subscription
http://nuttybar.drama.uga.edu/mailman/listinfo/dirgames - director games info
http://www.acm.org/crossroads/xrds6-5/macromedia.html - prototype testing with director
http://www.director-online.com/ - tips & tricks
http://www.herts.ac.uk/lis/mmedia/directortutorial/ - director tutorial basics
http://www.sfx.co.nz/tamahori/thought/shock_3d_howto.html -shockwave 3d how-to
http://www.monkeyfarm.com/howtomakegames.html - duhh - doh!
http://www.director-online.com/ -send questions get replys...
http://www.dubbus.com/devnull - director 3d polygons using dave's engine - dave makes the most popular lingo 3d engine - don't ask me how it works i haven't figured it out yet.
Dean's director  video tutorial- http://www.deansdirectortutorials.com/resources/
Dean's FAQ - http://www.deansdirectortutorials.com/FAQ/
Adding que points to Director - http://www.director-online.com/buildArticle.php?id=988
Adding que points II  - http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/director/tips/qt/012.html

More information about the course exploring the artisitic use of these capabilities is available at the description of the Art 412 Conceptual Information Arts: Introduction to Art & Technology.
 
rev 7/30/06

Stephen Wilson, Professor, Art, Conceptual/Information Arts Program, San Francisco State University Information about the Conceptual/Information Arts program    (415) 338-2291   swilson@sfsu.eduWilson web page Copyright, Stephen Wilson, 1999 - You are free to use the text as long as you attribute source and do not use it commercially.