My exams were over, I now have to turn my attention back to Director engine. I continued to work 5 days ago. And next things have emerged:
Starting from Director 4, RIFX containers can have little-endian byte order, specifically for this, regular ReadStream was amended to ReadStreamEndian and now engine can work with both orders. In so doing, byte order is determined by first tag (“RIFX” or “XFIR”)
As it happens, I needs to complete some work related to my student status. It’s about my exams. In this regard, in the coming week my time should be given to questions about tropical geometry and information models/processes.
At the end of week, I will continue to work on Director engine.
And once again I’m writing about my GSOC progress.
This week:
A week went by, engine changes, but slowly. Now is the moment when differences in Director versions are important.
Under the supervision of sev, I started to learn life cycle of the playback/draw system, it’s important because it can tell about when causes local events, such as frameEnter, frameExit, idle. In other words, we want to achieve event order, same as in Director. For me personally, it was hard to figure out what order is correct, sev advised me to check it right in Director. Because our target game is Journeyman Project, I looked in 4.0 version. By writing a simple script, I have found right positions in my code for calling this events.
In previous post I promised to implement frame by frame system and deal with transparent objects.
At the beginning, I have written tempo channel handler. And depending on the frame tempo value (FPS/Delay) , it can determine time for next frame. Some examples:
When we learn how to to deal with Director objects, our aim will be to build a structure, that can execute animations.
For this purpose, three working classes were established.
Sprite – information about position, size and reference to cast data.
Frame – set of sprites and information about tempo, delay, palette.
Score – just set of frames.
One of the main resources of the Director is DIB pictures, we will often meet it in our bookshelf animations. In map of objects DIB has FourCC ‘DIB ‘ and color palette is ‘CLUT‘.
We have faced with example with 4bpp pictures (16 colours). Decoding colour table had been no big problem, but at the decoding picture stage was seen absence of 4bpp decoder.
It is the first post from series of posts about my future summer project: integration Director games.
To be quite frank, Director doesn’t need introduction. It is the game engine popular in due time, from the MacroMind company (Macromedia, Adobe). You can read in more detail here: