Chapter 15. Scripting Lingo

Lingo, Director's scripting language, adds an interactive dimension to Director movies. Through Lingo, you enable users to communicate with your movie: They can type text, drag sprites , and click on buttons , and the movie can respond to these inputs in limitless ways ( Figure 15.1 ).

Figure 15.1. Lingo allows users to communicate with a movie in a variety of ways, including typing text, clicking buttons, and dragging sprites.

In the preceding chapter, "Adding Behaviors," you learned how to create behaviors with the tools supplied in the Behavior Inspector. Those tools, however, offer very limited control over just a few aspects of a movie. By contrast, Lingo scripts can control every aspect of a movie ”sound, positions of sprites, text input and output, playback of digital video, and all the other features of Director that have been covered so far in this book ( Figure 15.2 ).

Figure 15.2. Experienced Lingo programmers often control the animation, sounds, transitions, and other elements of their movies entirely by means of Lingo scripts. A movie constructed in this way may use only a single frame in the Score.

To really use Lingo, you have to assimilate a lot more information than can be covered in this one chapter. Entire books have been written about Lingo, and if you want to get into Lingo scripting more deeply, you'll do well to get one of them. In the meantime, this chapter will introduce you to the basics of Lingo scripts and offer a few examples. The chapter covers types of scripts and how they differ , the basics of writing a script, ways to assign a script to a movie or one of its elements, and specific instructions for simple sprite and cast-member interactions.