[dirGames-L] dynamic sprite creation and imaging lingo

[Jim Andrews]

I have enjoyed reading the Dirgames thread beginning at
http://nuttybar.drama.uga.edu/pipermail/dirgames-l/2002-June/016790.html
concerning "Sprites vesus Imaginglingo". The thread discussed/argued
different approaches to 'dynamic sprite creation'. Or perhaps it would be
more accurate to say it compared 'dynamic sprite creation' with 'imaging
lingo' representation of visible entities in Director?

I'm familiar with the method, commonly called 'dynamic sprite creation',
where you puppets sprite channels. More specifically, you puppet sprite
channels that never, at any point in the Score, contain a drag and drop
(static) sprite, so well-known gotchas do not come into play. Robert Tweed
outlined the sort of system I am most familiar with: you create a Dynamic
Channel Manager (DCM) that doles out available sprite channels when dynamic
sprites are created, and when dynamic sprites are destroyed, the DCM is
notified so as to tag the channel as allocatable once again.

Puppeting a channel, populating it with a member, creating and attaching
behaviors to the sprite, and initializing those behaviors have some fine
points but no problems arise if done carefully. Similarly, the destruction
of the sprite and making the channel once again reusable pose no problems.
It is a nice system for dynamic sprite creation.

The puppeting of sprite channels does not seem to be in the Macromedia test
suite, as stated by John Dowdell on Direct-L in another heated discussion of
the topic (subject='dynamic sprite creation') ie, they do not officially
support it, but it has been going on since D5 and practicioners take umbrage
at the assertion that it is unsupported and could therefore break in
subsequent releases of Director. I am a practicioner of 'dynamic sprite
creation' myself (in http://vispo.com/wfs4). So it is a concern to me but
the heat has been high on this topic and I'm sure Macromedia understands
that were it to break we would just have to get extreme.

However, my question concerns the imaging lingo approach. I wonder if
someone would be so kind as to outline the nature of this approach. I have
done very little imaging lingo. I have seen, for instance, Luke Wigley's
excellent work at his lingoworkshop.com, where he creates one-sprite menus
in scrolling windows that do not suffer in performance at all. Presumably
there is quite a bit of image compositing happening off-stage? What, in
outline, is going on there, or in similar imaging lingo approaches? Are
there a few 'princples' of imaging lingo? How easy is it to set up different
clickable areas in a single composited imaging lingo image? I have also seen
Chuck Neal's excellent Imaging Lingo tutorial at
http://www.mediamacros.com/item/item-1006687089/ and have gone through parts
of it but can't say I understand Imaging Lingo well in its general ideas.

Is it quite distinct from dynamic sprite creation or are the two suitable to
be combined in some optimal approach that takes advantage of Director's
strengths toward being able to create applications that are powerful in
scope and performance? For instance, could Luke's one-sprite menu (or
similarly generated things) be dynamic as well as a result of imaging lingo?

Are there docs out there that discuss the ideas/principles of imaging lingo?

Finally, what is it about Director that makes dynamic sprite creation such a
difficult thing to support? I have heard it relates to the lack of OOP in
the earlier history of Director but it isn't clear to me. There does seem to
be a widely used, agreed upon methodology concerning dynamic sprite creation
and it has been going on since D5, so why isn't it in the test suite?

ja