Michael Rhoades  wrote:

>Hi Ross,
>     I am curious about the reference to Macromedia Director. I have just
>obtained a copy of it and don't know much about it yet except what I have
>seen it do on the internet. I am going to use it to create visuals for a
>cd-rom version of the next CD I release. How are you using it to generate
>.sco files? Please elaborate...


Hi Michael,

Director manages data as "casts members" in "casts", a kind o virtual file
system. One supported cast member type is as "field" which is basically just
a chunk of text. Lingo (director's scripting language) has a number of
powerful text chunking functions so you can write things like:

x = word 4 of line 27 of field("data3")

which makes it really easy to parse scos or other tab/space delimited data.
There is also a dot operator syntax in D7 which I don't remember exactly,
something like x = field("data3").line[27].word[4]

So I write a lingo script to take sco lines from one text cast member and
generate a new score in another cast member. This way I can generate
multichannel scores in paralell. When I've finished I just cut and paste the
scos into text files, although I could get director to save out a .csd
automagically if I put my mind to it.

The way I'm working with it is pretty primative - I define a lingo function
that generates a score and then call it from the message window. There's no
reason why you couldn't make a simple gui where you enter parameters into
fields and press a button to generate a score.

Ross.