a Tuesday feature
About those suggestions, there were quite a few of them that were sent in, but they lacked the diversity we need for our project. Because of this I'll have to ask you to send any suggestions other than creating a transitional Xtra to me as we work our way through the next few weeks. Our First Steps Toward Building an Xtra!
Because the majority of you asked for it, our first Xtra will be a transitional effect. To do this, we will need to first look at some of the information provided by Macromedia on creating Xtras. This information is found in the Director Xtra XDK.
What the Heck is an XDK?
XDK stands for the Xtra Development Kit. This kit provides the resources you need to implement Xtras for a Macromedia application. In addition to documentation, the Director XDK provides header files for Director, multimedia, and MOA API and examples of how to implement several kinds of Director Xtras.What is in the Xtra Development Kit?
Resources provided by Macromedia in the Director XDK are organized into the following four sections (Macromedia refers to these directories):
Docs: Director XDK and MOA documentation in rtf and html format
Examples: Project files for several Director Xtra examples, includes Header files for Xtra development
Utility: Utility programs for use in developing Xtras
Xtras: Compiled versions of the example Xtras Asset Properties of Transition Xtras
One of the first things we need to look at is the table of asset properties provided from Macromedia.General Transition Properties
Symbol Type Get/Set Description Notes transitionType integer G/S Transition ID (for built-in transitions only) duration integer G/S Transition duration (ms: 0-32000) changeArea integer G/S 0=Full-screen, 1=Change-area only chunkSize integer G/S Chunk size (opposite of smoothness) 1-128 <Custom Props> Additional custom properties may be supported by Xtra-based transitions. See Xtra's documentation. <Custom Funcs> Custom functions may be supported by Xtra-based transitions. See Xtra's documentation. Now that we have this basic information, let's start working on our Xtra! We'll keep the transition a surprise for now. Until next week.
