Introducing the CastDirector''s Cast window is where you place and organize assets for your projects. Any sprites that appear on the Stage must first appear within a cast. Assets can be created within Director, as you already learned, or imported from external sources. You can import many different kinds of media into Director''s casts including bitmap images, vectors, sounds, other Director movies, Flash movies, video, and more. The following figure shows various types of assets in the internal cast. [View full size image] You see that each different type of cast member has a different icon associated with it. The icon is more helpful when the Cast view style is set to List view, as the icon is the only representation shown in that view. In Thumbnail view, as shown here, the icon is less useful, because you can generally tell what the cast member is just by looking at it. As you progress through the lessons and use different types of media, you will become familiar with the various icons and using the cast in general. Note the title of the cast: Internal. The internal cast is Director''s default cast and can''t be erased. You can, however, add additional casts so that you can organize your assets into logical sections. Many developers will place things like Lingo scripts in the internal cast and then create additional casts such as Graphics, Sound, or Text, and import assets into the appropriate cast. You are free to store all of your assets in the internal cast alone, but using multiple casts will help to keep your projects organizedand make assets a lot easier to find. Being organized is not the only reason to use multiple casts. An excellent example of using multiple casts is in multilingual productions. Each language is stored in its own cast and then swapped as necessary to change the language displayed to the user. TIP Each cast you create can store up to 32,000 members, and you can have an unlimited number of caststheoretically, anyway; your system will be the limiting factor. So don''t be shy about creating new casts to organize your assets. Note You probably noticed the Drag Cast Member button just to the left of the member''s name in the Cast toolbar. It functions, or is supposed to function the way you just learnedallowing you to select a range of members and move them to a new spot or new cast.Instead of clicking the selected members, however, you click the button. This is all fine, exceptfor one thing. With the button, you can only move one member at a time to a new cast. To prove this, try moving multiple cast members by using the button. For this reason I suggest moving members the way you just learned and not using the Drag Cast Member button. |