nightwares mini logoA brief introduction to Director

16. Revised Working Draft

Looking at the progress so far.

Director 8.5 Shockwave Studio: A Beginner's Guide

Online reader support forum for the book

At this point you can save your file. Give it a name like "hello.dir".

If you were to compile this program now into a projector, you'd have pretty much everything you needed -- the message, the pause, and the option for the user to quit. However, you still wouldn't have a menu, and if you recall, that is one of our stated objectives for "Hello, World".

Furthermore, you probably can think of ways you might make the program more attractive or flashy, but that's beyond the scope of this tutorial. In the next section we'll go into menus and how to build them so you can make them work on either Mac or Windows.


1. Introduction

2. Definition of Objectives

3. Specific Objectives

4. Stage Size

5. Stage Location

6. Setting the Stage's Color

7. Beginning to Enter Script

8. A bit More About the StartMovie() Handler

9. Entering Another Handler

10. A Break-down of the CheckColor() Handler

11. A Quick Test

12. Adding Text to the Stage

13. Preparing to Enter a Frame Script

14. Entering the Frame Script

15. Adding a Quit Button

16. The Progress so Far

17. Preparing to Add a Menu

18. Discussion of Menu Requirements

19. Preparing the Menu Storage Member

20. Entering Menu Functions for Macintosh

21. Entering Menu Functions for Windows

22. Efficientlly Handling Multiple Menus

23. Preparing to Insert the Menus Onscreen

24. Adding the Menu Installation Handler

25. Discussion of the Menu Installation Handler

26. Adding Code for an About Box

27. Review of the Scripts

28. Creating a Projector and Running it