Lesson 1 - Getting Started
You are going to need a copy of Director 6 or later.
With Director running, select New Movie from the File menu so that you are starting afresh.
Select Movie... Properties from the Modify Menu and click on the stagecolor chip. Select a "night sky" colour like Dark Blue or Black.
You will also need some media. If you want to make them in Director, that's fine, you can also make it in a number of other graphic applications. Alternatively you could simply copy and paste the graphics from this page into the Cast of your movie.
The media you require most immediately will be:
| Two graphics of a space invader facing left and right respectively. | |
| A bullet graphic | |
| A graphic for the player's defensive cannon. | |
When you've done this, your cast window should look something like this:
As you can see I have named each graphic appropriately. It's very good practice to name your cast members because you can refer to them by their names in you Lingo code. There are also a number of tricks that can be performed with Lingo to select cast members for display or use, purely according to their names. For this reason it is quite important that your cast members have unique names. Give your cast members the same names as shown here ("inv1", "inv2", "cannon" and "bullet"). Now Save the movie as
"Inva.DIR"
The cast is where all the media you use in your movie is stored. It's possible to use media which is not in the cast, and it's possible to have media in the cast which are not used at all. I'm not going to dwell on those issues here. The reader is referred again to Brue Epstein's Director in a Nutshell. You can download a free chapter covering this stuff from his website.
Cast members are basically stored media. When you save your movie, the contents of any internal casts are stored too.
Cast members only become useful when they are on the stage (as sprites) or otherwise activated by scripts or effects channels (in the case of sounds, transitions, palettes etc.). You can also have the same cast member appearing many times on the screen and in different frames of your movie, which provides a tremendous bandwidth advantage over uncompressed digital video (for example) where every pixel of every frame usually has to be stored as seperate data.
On the other hand, it is not uncommon for a cast to contain thousands of cast members. It might seem unlikely now, but you really should get into the habit of naming and organising your cast members so that when your projects grow they do not become unmanageable.