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Adobe Director 11 Tutorials
Working With Behaviors / Behaviors Overview
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Director 11 / Working With Behaviors / Behaviors Overview)
We now turn our attention to using behaviors in your Director projects. Behavior in Director is prewritten Lingo or JavaScript code that you use to provide interactivity and add interesting effects to a movie. Their essentially snippets of prewritten code that you simply drag and drop onto Sprites on the Stage or to frames here in the Score. Behaviors are found in other Adobe products such as Dreamweaver and Flash, so you may be already familiar with this concept, but I think the Director offers by far the most comprehensive and useful behaviors of any authoring program that I've ever used. You use behaviors by simply dragging them from the Library Palette and then drop them onto a Sprite or a frame to attach it. So you choose window, Library Palette, you want to open up the behaviors section or folder there of the Library Palette, I've already demonstrated the use of Flash components, but notice that behaviors provides quite a comprehensive list here and again to use them all you have to do is drag and drop them onto a Sprite, for many of them you'll get this parameters dialog that will let you set the parameters for how that behavior will act. In this case I'm fading out this image here, so you'll notice- actually I'm fading it in, in this case, but really applying them is as simply as just dragging and dropping them onto a Sprite. Here's the rotate continuously and I can rotate this once every 60 seconds, once every 10 seconds, so that image is going to fade in and then rotate, probably will rotate continuously since its taking longer then ten seconds to complete the rotation and what's great about these behaviors is that you can click on, make sure that your Sprite Overlay is turned on under View, Sprite Overlay, Show Info, that'll show you information about the behaviors that are applied to that Sprite. I click on that little icon there and here in the behavior tab of the Property Inspector I can see the list of behaviors. In this case I can change the fade in or out, I can take the maximum fade to 100 percent or some fraction of that. Here's my start automatic on my fade in and there's my time period for the fade in, looks like I've also got the rotate continuously should also be in here, there it is right there, I click on the Rotate Continuously and I can change that to Rotate once every minute. Let's rewind that and play it back, this time it should rotate, oh I see its rotating once, one complete rotation every minute so that Ð in essence that's a speed parameter right there. Let's change that to a one and now its going to spin very fast indeed, so it makes one complete rotation every second and spins continuously. That's probably a good definition of that behavior. So notice that if the behavior requires parameters both a dialog appears for defining those parameters and then you can also click on the Sprite Overlay or the icon of the behavior and then change the parameters here in the Property Inspector. I should also point out at this Stage you can attach the same behavior to as many Sprites or frames as necessary and then use different parameters for each instance of this behavior. Most behaviors respond to simple events such as a mouse click on a Sprite or the entry in this case of the play head into a frame. When the event occurs the behavior performs an action such as jumping to a different frame or playing a sound. Director as you saw comes prepackaged with customizable, reusable behaviors for many, many basic functions and this is why I really like the behaviors that ship with Director better then some of the other programs, some of the other programs you're limited to the types of things you can do with behaviors but the list here in Director is pretty exhaustive and I find that I use them all the time. In addition you and other developers can also create and share your behaviors by writing Lingo or JavaScript syntax. Now in this case I have several Sprites here that have a variety of behaviors attached tot hem, for example this Photos button here has two behaviors, rollover member change and go to frame X. The main menu has four behaviors, rollover member change, rollover cursor change and go next button. Now Director executes behaviors in the order they were attached to a Sprite and their listed in this order in the Property Inspector. Sometimes it's necessary to change the sequence of behavior so the actions occur in a different order. To do this simply click on the Sprite and then open up the Property Inspector, the behavior tab, click on the behavior that you want to change the order and then click on the up or down arrow buttons to change that order. In some cases the order in which these behaviors execute will have a dramatic effect on the presentation, other times it won't have any effect on the way that Director plays back the behaviors. So there you have an overview of behaviors in Director 11. Let me now move onto the next several movies and take you on a guided tour of some of my favorite Director behaviors.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Director 11 |
| Author: | James Gonzalez |
| SKU: | 33901 |
| ISBN: | 1-934743-84-4 |
| Release Date: | 2008-07-31 |
| Duration: | 9.5 hrs / 107 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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