What You Will Learn

In the course of completing the lessons in this book you'll learn the skills necessary to create many different types of multimedia applications for both CD/DVD-ROM and Web delivery.

By the end of this course, you'll be able to:

• Navigate and use Director's development environment and its toolset

• Use casts and cast members effectively

• Create sprite animation using both keyframe techniques and programmatic techniques

• Add and control sounds within your movies

• Use various video formats such as DVD, QuickTime, and Windows Media, among others

• Write and understand basic Lingo, Director's object-oriented scripting language

• Use Flash movies as assets within your Director applications

• Create dialog boxes using another Director movie running in a window

• Use imaging Lingo to draw dynamic graphs and images

• Publish your projects to CD and/or the Web

• Filter keyboard input and allow keyboard control

• Detect basic collisions in both 2D and 3D

• Use object-oriented programming techniques to simplify your projects

• Use databases for storage and retrieval

• Identify potential problems and use Director's debugger

Minimum System Requirements

Note that Director MX 2004 requires product activation over the Internet or by telephone before it will run.

Director MX 2004 builds on a strong prior foundation, expanding its scripting language to give users an unprecedented level of control over many different media formats. With a good foundation in using Director, your skill set will improve rapidly as the projects you create become more involved. You will find Director extremely flexible, easy to use, and very addicting. Beware of finding yourself brewing coffee at 1 a.m. because you're working on your new 2D tiling engine code.

Chapter 1. Director MX 2004 Basics

What You Will Learn

In this lesson, you will:

• Become familiar with the Director development environment

• Create your first movie

• Learn about panel sets and set up your own workspace

• Set cast and movie preferences

Approximate Time

This lesson should take you about 90 minutes to complete.

Lesson Files

Media Files:

None

Starting Files:

None

Completed Files:

None

This is the first lesson in the Portfolio Presentation Project. During the course of the next five lessons, you will build a movie that displays samples of your work using many of Macromedia Director's capabilities, such as animation, sound, and video. At the end of the project, you'll publish the movie to a CD-ROM that can be shown to prospective employers , clients , or just about anyone with a computer.

Media assets provided on the CD were created by Jessey Vigue of blurredistinction (www.blurredistinction.com) as part of her own portfolio. She has graciously allowed us to use her artwork for this course, although if you have art of your own to use, by all means do so.

The completed portfolio project

In this lesson, you'll take a tour of Director's Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Although we won't go into too much detail in this lesson, we will touch upon many of its important aspects. Director has its share of specialty tools, but it shares a set of common interface elements with other Macromedia products in the MX line. This commonality makes it easier for people to go back and forth between different applicationssomething you will end up doing many times on some projects.