Home Assessment Criteria Technical Report Storyboard Meetings The Future	Technical Report Screenshots of our work in progress are available now!!! Macromedia Director 8 Started creating elements using Vector graphics (Vector editing facilities of Director). Played around with tweening sprites (motion and scale). Defined keyframes. Made use of library functions. Good points Mouse is constantly aware of its location and scrolls well in different areas of Director 8. All window panes and command buttons have lengthy information about its functionality which is displayed in pop-up windows. Very easy to cut and paste sprite behaviour from the score. Good features, tweening, special effects, drag&drop for behaviour. Frame by frame animation and designing Vector graphics is easy with this tool. Code editing/highlighting is good. Help file and context sensitive help are good (lots of resources on WWW). Certain sprites share mutual properties, by selecting multiple sprites the user is able to adjust any of these properties all at once. Bad points Director's ability to assemble a presentation by putting together the parts is very awkward!: Sound and library scripts (fade out, mouse over, cursor change) do not work properly in an imported Director Movie! This also causes conflicts when converting a Director movie to a Director executable project. Therefore we had to spend a lot of time rewriting Lingo scripts and importing into one huge, obscure and nasty monster project. Our intention was to create each theme separately in different presentations measuring 640x400 pixels. Then we wanted to import each theme as an object to the main presentation measuring 640x480 pixels. Unfortunately the imported object does not allow any interactions (clicks, jumps) although the movie plays. The Undo function is very limited. Components of a movie get plentiful, no way of creating cast libraries, and separating content. Can have multiple representations of the cast library, but not empty ones which would enable the user to quickly identify components. We had problems with the following points: Sprites would unexpectedly change in size. Sprites would appear on the stage in a location not specified by the user. These problems would not occur at all times but are able to send the author bonkers. On running the presentation certain sprites changed locations which was not instructed by the author. 3DFX Created animation using the 3DFX tool. Encountered several problems: The possibilities of the 3DFX tool are very limited and caused difficulties when attempting to import graphics. (BMP, GIF) 3DFX does not provide the functionality to synchronise sound with animation! The Gimp Created the logo with the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program). The Gimp is very similar to Photoshop and provides a vast number of easy to use scripts. Encountered no difficulties. In fact - The Gimp rulez! General It is superb to convert a movie to MP4. This reduces the filesize from 40M to 2.5M (includes converting the 1.5M wave file to mp3). Some problems occured while trying to synchronise the sound to the animation sequence.
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