The Coach's Edge Play Behavior is the first in a series of Authoring Aids for Coach's Edge developers. These behaviors are intended to bring the power of Jaguar into the template creation process.
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Function: Enables the playback of a Coach's Edge play exported from Jaguar.
Version History:
1.0 1/13/99 - Start of Version Control. Author - Steve Hagenlock
Usage: Drag this behavior onto the sprite that will be the court. It is assumed that where it sits is where it will play. It is suggested that you have a series of 80 "Placeholder" sprites sitting in the score in a row. Use the first one as your 'court'
The behavior will assume that the sprite you drop it on is the court and will take care of everything from there.
Special Features: The CE Play Behavior is feature rich and super-user friendly. Check these features out!
ΓÇó Automatic Global Variable Management (no muss, no fuss)
ΓÇó Behavior Inspector for configuring playback options. (drag and drop authoring)
ΓÇó Painless playback methods. (press the start button in a play frame, it fires right up)
ΓÇó Z-Sorting, Rototscoping, Breakdown, Speed, Play Mode, etc. all configurable easily!
ΓÇó Auto import, Cast Cleaning, and Preperations for Shockwave Routines
ΓÇó Create Single-Image representations of your E-Chalk for that Hi-Fi look!
ΓÇó Use as many playfiles in your template as your space requirements dictate!
ΓÇó Common, tag-based play file format for easy upgradeability.
ΓÇó Easy Access to Play Comments and E-Chalk Comments.
ΓÇó Library based authoring in Director 6.5+
ΓÇó Use as much or as little Play Control Interface as you wish.
ΓÇó Works hand in hand with your Jaguar installation
ΓÇó Choose an Active or Locked score during playback.
ΓÇó Complex button behavior including facilities for attention grabbing and CE Play Hooks.
Assumptions: This behavior assumes that when it comes to the Playback Controls set, that a proper naming convention is applied to the cast members (as illustrated below). It's either this, or you have to configure ALL of this information in the behavior inspector (and there is a behavior to do this, but you probably don't want to use it).
This behavior assumes that there are approx 53 sprite channels available to it to wrangle to it's will, all of them directly following the sprite the behavior was attached to.
Requirements: The full set of members from the CE Play Libary should be present in the movie. The control panel items can be anything you want them to be as long as their names reflect the proper naming conventions:
Speed Displayer = "currentSpeed"
Time Bar = "timeBar"
Play Head = "PlayHead"
Speed Down Button = "SpeedDown"
Speed Up button = "SpeedUp"
Stop Button = "stop"
Start Button = "start"
Required Objects: These Code Objects Should be in the cast if you are using this behavior:
Load CE Play --The Master Behavior
Play_Class --Implementation of CE Play Code
DrawManager --E-Chalk Drawing Manager
drawPage --E-Chalk Page Manager
fhDraw --E-Chalk Draw Style
ecGraphic --E-Chalk Draw Style
PopUpManager --RollOver Text Manager
Standard Button w/ Coach's Edge Hooks --The Button Behavior
time_Class --Implementation of CE Time Manager
Suggested Objects: The Coach's Edge play behavior can use a variety of different media elements to represent the functions of Play, Stop, Time Bar, Rewind, etc. You have access to a "library" of these elements and can use them at your discretion during the template authoring process. Just make sure that the proper behaviors are attached to the elements to gain the correct functionality.
How Do I?---------------------------
Import a PlayFile?
1 - Open your message window
2 - Type "Installplay"
3 - Locate the .PLX file that you want to load in the file requester opens.
4 - If everything goes fine, the file and all of it's media will load.
5 - It is important not to move this data once it is loaded, the Play Data section and Play Media section can be moved as a whole, but the order and such that they are installed is important.
Import a bunch of Playfiles at the same time?
1 - Open your message window
2 - Type "Installfolder"
3 - Locate a .PLX file that you want to load out of the folder of .PLX files when the file requester opens.
4 - If everything goes fine, the files and all of their media will load.
5 - It is important not to move this data once it is loaded, the Play Data section and Play Media section can be moved as a whole, but the order and such that they are installed is important.
Make my own E-Chalk Graphic?
1 - Install your playfile, create the score area and attatch the CE Play Behavior
2 - Run the playfile, when the e-chalk paints, do a screen capture
3 - Open the screen capture in photoshop, crop to the EXACT court size
4 - Create your lines/media in a seperate layer
5 - Copy/Paste that layer into your director template
6 - Name it (IMPORTANT!) example: KY-Yahoo!2.plx_DrawData_2.pict The name should be the exact name of the echalk data that you are replacing with the ".pict" extention added to it. Make sure that you don't throw the e-chalk data away, it is still used for timing purposes. As long as the image file is present with that name, it will be used instead of the e-chalk freehand drawings.
Clear all the playfiles out this template?
1 - Open the message window and type "clearplays"
This will remove ALL play media and play data.
IMPORTANT - do not put anything that you've created directly after any information in the PlayData or PlayMedia area as the 'clearplays' command will remove it as well. As long as there is an empty castmember after each section, things will be fine.
Clear ONE playfile out of this template?
1 - Sorry....
Prepare this movie for shockwave distribution?
1 - Open the message window and type "prepshock".
This will remove all castmembers with the name "auto-delete'
2 - You may wish to do some hand optimising as well.
3 - Make sure that you don't have any linked cast libraries.
Where does a playfile come from? What's a "tagged file format"?
1 - Jaguar creates the playfile with the command -Export->PlayData. Any play that Jaguar can open or create can be imported into a template and played back with this behavior!
2 - A Tagged File Format is a file format where every piece of data is 'tagged'. This allows us to easily upgrade the file format and still have it be backwards and forwards compatible with versions of this playback engine. As a matter of fact, you can add your own tags to a .plx file and, through Lingo programming, extract and use the data that in your template. So... whaddaya say? Do you feel lucky?, well... do ya, punk?
