Director to LiveCode Help?

[Schatze]

With Adobe discontinuing sales and support for Director, I would think there there would be a lot of Director refugees looking into LiveCode. I saw a JavaScript to LiveCode Cheat sheet, but could not find one for Director to LiveCode. I am an educator and so an easy-to-use language like LiveCode is of interest to me. If anyone knows where I can find some easy ways to convert my code, that would be great. if not, what would be the next best alternative. I am also wondering where I would place what we call startMovie scripts in LiveCode? I have also found that there are no frames in LiveCode, so where do the framescripts from Director go in LiveCode. With these tidbits of assistance, I believe I should be able to determine if the educational games I developed in Director can be easily ported to LiveCode.

[bogs]

Hello Schatze, and welcome to the forum and language

I never played with Director myself, but I believe Richard (fourthworld) has, so hopefully he will chime in on this topic.

If "startMovie" means what it sounds like, I think you'd find the relevant information under the Player object entries in the dictionary. You can find the dictionary also on Brian's site for handy 'out of the IDE' use.

Player object entries....

The various guides (in the built in help) are a lot better formatted now, but if you have further questions, feel free to chime in and ask here or on the list

Guide section on video...

[jacque]

Director and LiveCode use very different paradigms, so it isn't always easy or possible to directly translate scripts. I've not used Director myself, but I have done a port of a large project from Director to LiveCode and little of the existing code was useable as-is. One reason is that Director is based on time-based playback and LiveCode is based on responses to user activity, so there is no timeline per se. The Director handlers were all geared toward a different kind of interactivity and didn't directly translate to the message hierarchy that LiveCode uses. What I did was to watch and learn how the Director app worked, and then rewrite the functionality in LiveCode. The code was quite different when I was done but the end result was the same.

You will probably have to do some un-learning to switch your focus a bit, but it gets easier as you go along. We're here to help with that. We do have a Director expert in our community, Colin Holgate, who has been working with both development platforms for a long time and he would be a terrific resource for you. I don't know if he reads the forums but you may know him, since he is a major figure in the Director community. Maybe he'll see this and chime in.

But for now, if you can tell us exactly what "startMovie" does, we'll tell you how to do it in LiveCode. I'm not sure if you just want to play a video, or if that's how Director starts a sequence of actions.

[CoIin]

LiveCode, the language, comes from the same place that HyperTalk came from, and so did Lingo. If you know verbose Lingo, a lot of the code would work in LiveCode without any changes.

LiveCode doesn't do dot syntax, so adapting dot syntax Lingo would take more time.

Director has scripts in three or more main places, but most people just use two of them, frame scripts and movie scripts. In LiveCode that is the same, more or less, as Card scripts and Stack scripts.

The exact answer to your question is that openStack is the same as startMovie, and preOpenStack is the same as prepareMovie.

Like Director, objects can have scripts too. Many other languages don't do that, instead you have a higher level script that adds a listener to the object. So, in terms of ease of understanding, LiveCode is quite like Director.

The metaphor is the main difference. With Director you have to do extra work to make the timeline stop where it is. For making applications, such as kiosks, you would have a 'go the frame' on one frame, and that frame would have all of the UI for that section of the app. With LiveCode it's a card metaphor, just go to the card that has the UI for that section, and then you don't have to do anything, it will stay there.

I'll stop there for now, to see if you have follow up questions.

By the way, a lot of people are in the LiveCode email list, who don't come to the forum much (I'm one of them). Could be worth signing up for that. Oddly, the forum doesn't seem to like URLs in either messages or links. Do a Google search for "use-livecode". The first result is where you go to subscribe.

[Klaus]

Hi Schatze and Colin,

welcome to the forum!

Due lots of spammer, you need to ahve at least 10 postings befoe you can post links etc.
Here the URL to the Livecode mailing list:
http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode

I had also been using Director until I discovered Metacard (the grandfather of Livecode) in 1999 and never looked back! I almost forget everything in Director.

Best

Klaus

[bogs]

The exact answer to your question is that openStack is the same as startMovie, and preOpenStack is the same as prepareMovie.

Ah, ok, that might have been my next guess (probably not though). Sorry for any confusion from my previous post

[CoIin]

Klaus, thanks for the explanation. I wasn't able to convince the forum about my user name, and there is no Forgot Username option to try. So I registered again with a new name!

[CoIin]

bogs, Director can use QuickTime MOVs, FLV, MP4, H.264, and various other video formats. With some of those there will be events that may be similar to LiveCode's player object. But the main document type in Director is called a movie (it's all a film based metaphor), in the same way that a LiveCode is a stack. But any Director movie need not include any video, or even any animation come to that.

[bogs]

Hey Colin, thank you for the information. I only ever briefly looked at Director, so my personal knowledge of it is... lacking to say the least

[trags3]

Just found this old conversation.
Can LiveCode play Director .DCR files?
Tom

[Klaus]

Hi Tom,

Just found this old conversation.
Can LiveCode play Director .DCR files?
Tom

no.


Best

Klaus

[richmond62]

I did some work with Director in 1998-9, at the same time as I was working with Toolbook. I can honestly say I remember nothing of either of them beyond the fact that Toolbook seemed like an awkward, coloured version of Hypercard, and that Director left me with an impression it could do mulithreading as it was very easy to have several sprites jiggling around in different ways at the same time.

I wonder why Director was discontinued?

[richmond62]

Personally, I feel the best way forward would be to open your Director file in Director on an older computer and run that alongside a computer running LiveCode and copy its functionality.

Yes, I know this is a reply to a question posted yonks ago: the solution still stands.

https://www.macintoshrepository.org/sof ... r&sid=&p=1 "PowerPC uniquement" . . . Hmm

https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/macromedia-director-60

Why do I have "a funny feeling" that a Windows version of Director would run without any obvious problems
under WINE on LInux?

https://www.macintoshrepository.org/264 ... ector-11-5

Both Macintosh and Windows versions of Director 11.5 available here:

https://archive.org/download/adobe_director_11.5

[richmond62]

Yum:

https://ia600908.us.archive.org/16/item ... erence.pdf
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Presumably (?) that should have no problems running on MacOS 10.6.8 or MacOS 10.7.5 (two systems I have access to),
or, for that matter any system up to MacOS 10.15 'Catalina' which stopped support for 32-bit software.
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Anyone feeling an urge to shout mildly abusive stuff about Apple's lack of support for 32-bit software . . .