Lingo 2 Tutorial: Introduction to Navigation with Lingo

File "basic.dir"

Save this file onto your hard drive to use it as a starting point for this tutorial.

Take a look at the slides describing visually how the different navigation techniques can be accomplished in Director.

File "linear.dir"

contains six demotivational posters (a sarcasm on the motivational posters often seen at business offices) that will be used as screens for navigation. You may want to use this file as a starting point to save a little time. It also contains a title page as a first cast member. The seven members are placed in different channels and play slowly linearly, with speed five frames per second. If you want to give some control to the user to move on to the next poster, you can insert timing commands in the Tempo channel to proceed after a mouse click.

has some basic interactivity; you have to click the mouse to advance the slide show, and you always have the opportunity to go back to the title page. This is done through the "go to" command that is placed in the cast member of the TITLE. Effectively you create a 2D navigational structure out of Director's 1D score. Create a marker "start" on the initial frame and have the application go to to that frame by typing: go to frame "start"
Note: This is written in the old syntax of Lingo. In the new syntax you would write _movie.go("start")

gives the impression to the user that there is not much movement in the screen. The center of the screen showing a poster changes, but the navigational aids (the buttons at the top of the screen in this case) stay in the same place. The user feels that she can access any part of the application at the click of the corresponding button. The movie's progression is being stopped through frame script "goLoop" that is shown in the frame script channel. No need of sprite scripts and movie scripts yet.

File "network.dir"

allows movement between posters based on a predetermined network. You are always presented with a menu of available posters and you can visit one on demand. Notice that even this is a network, it is actually easy to develop if you start from the "frame" navigation file.