Navigation system - Flash or lingo?

[Adam Royle]

I'm about to start work on a Director CD-ROM project that has a lot of
screens. The navigation must sit on the interface at all times, and is
designed as a 3-level drop down navigation consisting of images. There are
approximately...

8 top level buttons
30 second level buttons (inside the 8 buttons above)
40 third level buttons (inside the 30 buttons above)

Now my question is, what would be better to use in this situation? An
embedded flash file? Or constructing this using Lingo? I've searched around
for a few days trying to find something similar, but it seems this is a
difficult thing to do in Director. (On a side note, I don't really want
hundreds of sprite channels littered with navigational elements - why oh why
doesn't Director have "MovieClips"??)

I'm an experienced Flash developer but am only new to Lingo, so doing
something like this in flash isn't a big deal for me. However I am concerned
about performance. There will be no video, but there will be images on
screen managed by a cue pointed external SWA.

Anyone have any suggestions or experiences they can share?

Thanks,
Adam

[Rob Dillon]

I'm not really sure where the question is. If you are experienced with
Flash then building the navigation in Flash will probably be simpler
for you. Without seeing a diagram of the interactivity or an example of
the content, it's difficult to say whether you would have a performance
hit by using one tool or the other.

If your navigation elements use large images,in terms of file size,
then need to consider if this, possibly bitmap, content will be
problematic in Flash. Flash animation will slow down somewhat inside
Director. Since Flash is dicey at best at animating bitmap content, you
may find that this animation is intolerable inside Director. If the
individual images are small and you develop the animation to work well
in Director, then things may work just fine.

Using dozens or even hundreds of sprite channels is no simpler or more
complex than using dozens or hundreds of layers in dozens of movieClips
in Flash. It's different.

Since Director opens a new instance of the Flash player with every .swf
instance on the stage, you may find that if you design your Flash
content using a lot of individual .swf files that performance will
suffer. Using a single Flash .swf file for your navigation control may
give you better performance.

--
Rob
_______
Rob Dillon
Team Macromedia
[url]http://www.ddg-designs.com[/url]
412-243-9119

[url]http://www.macromedia.com/software/trial/[/url]

[Adam Royle]

Thanks for your input, I think I will use Flash for this. Just to clarify,
when I said I don't want to clutter up the score, I was merely referring to
the visual aspect of it - ie. in Flash the nav would be self contained
within a movieclip, and easier to manage (IMO) than sprites in a Director
score.

Adam

"Rob Dillon" <rob@ddg-designs.com> wrote in message
news:131020030950256611%rob@ddg-designs.com...

> I'm not really sure where the question is. If you are experienced with
> Flash then building the navigation in Flash will probably be simpler
> for you. Without seeing a diagram of the interactivity or an example of
> the content, it's difficult to say whether you would have a performance
> hit by using one tool or the other.
>
> If your navigation elements use large images,in terms of file size,
> then need to consider if this, possibly bitmap, content will be
> problematic in Flash. Flash animation will slow down somewhat inside
> Director. Since Flash is dicey at best at animating bitmap content, you
> may find that this animation is intolerable inside Director. If the
> individual images are small and you develop the animation to work well
> in Director, then things may work just fine.
>
> Using dozens or even hundreds of sprite channels is no simpler or more
> complex than using dozens or hundreds of layers in dozens of movieClips
> in Flash. It's different.
>
> Since Director opens a new instance of the Flash player with every .swf
> instance on the stage, you may find that if you design your Flash
> content using a lot of individual .swf files that performance will
> suffer. Using a single Flash .swf file for your navigation control may
> give you better performance.
>
> --
> Rob
> _______
> Rob Dillon
> Team Macromedia
> [url]http://www.ddg-designs.com[/url]
> 412-243-9119
>
> [url]http://www.macromedia.com/software/trial/[/url]