CompuServe Thread

I'll try to answer some of yur questions, however Right Answers can tell you best what their program can do. 1. Any Director2 script can be interupted with a muse click or, with programming, any key press. 2. Not sure what you mean by, "What rate can it play from CDTV." 3. Yes, an anim can be playing while a sound, picture, or another anim is loading. 4. Not sure about playing "music tracks." Yoou have to ask RA. 5&6 With some programming, yes, D2 can scroll vertically & horizontally. 7. Not sure about playing several brushes at once. My guess is "yes, with a little programming" but Right Answers would have to give you a complete answer.

One more thing. The latest Amiga World (March 1992) has a good sized article about Director 2 written by one of the creators of the program. I'm sure it will answer all your questions. It also states the CDTV welcome disk was put together with Director 2.

The sound play from disk can be interrupted once started, but it cannot be restarted from the middle, you'll have to start at the beginning again. The play rate is not easily computed. YOu can adjust the playback buffer size, and the sample rate, and both will allow you to compensate for disk transfer rate. I do know that there is a CDTV title that is using the disk play at 19K sample rate, but I don't know exactly what the buffer size is. Some people like to set a really big buffer size so that there is time to do other things to the disk while sounds are loading, such as loading pictures, but this is not synchronized so you may risk a lot of disk see-sawing when the sample task goes to disk in the middle of your picture load. Anims can be playing while loading or playing a sound, but you do have to tell it you don't want to wait for status unless it is a disk-sample which happens like that automatically. It is possible to play two disk samples simultaneously, but it may require some experimentation. Since the same task is doing all the work, they are synchronized, and you can individually adjust sample rates and playback buffer sizes. Horizontal scrolling can only be performed within certain constraints, you basically are adjusting the entire intuition preferences centering. You can load a hi-res image, display it as lo-res and scroll it around the screen, but again, you are adjusting all the preferences centering it may not be quite as full featured as is possible if it is done out from under Intuition (a capability which The Director does not provide). Vertical scrolling has similar constraints, though there is an example script of using the blitter and displaying a lo-res text screen in hi-res to do a reasonably efficient text crawl. The blitter is not the smoothest way to perform such tasks, using the SCONTROL command to adjust the viewport or the POSITION command to adjust preference centering are other alternatives. Several brushanims can be played at the same time, you simply interleave their loops: /loop: COPY 1 :rem copy in background BLIT 2,0,0,x,y,-1,-1 :rem blit brush 1

oops. ran out of message space. Here's that example script of playing several ANIM brushes::: /loop: COPY 1 :rem replace background BLIT 2,0,0,x1,y1,-1,-1 :rem place brush 1 BLIT 3,0,0,x2,y2,-1,-1 :rem place brush 2 PAUSE 1 DISPLAY :rem display the image …(compute next x1,y1, x2,y2)….. ANIM 10,2,done ANIM 11,3 done :rem update both animbrushes GOTO loop For each animbrush, there will be a BLIT command to add it to the screen, and an ANIM command to compute the next brush image. Using PAUSEMODE 1, the PAUSE command will equalize the time for each frame so that the frame rate is constant (provided there is enough time for the intervening commands to complete). There is an example script of a bouncing ball-type ANIM brush which could be easily expanded to additional ANIM brushes, etc…. Attaching the ANIM brush to the mouse movement is another typical application, and a sample script is provided on the Tutorial disk. Keith