How to make your own behaviours
Provided by Adam Montandon

You will need:
Basic understanding of lingo.
Good understanding of the director environment.
Director 8 or above.

Introduction
When many students start out coding lingo, they often cut-and-paste multiple copies of the same script, and attach it to different sprites, perhaps changing a variable here and there. Often, if you want 10 sprites to behave in a similar way, you may have to copy and paste the script, and alter it, 10 times. This is way too time consuming, so instead I like to make my own behaviours.

Behaviours are very easy to make in director, and they have many benefits. Firstly it stops you having to copy and past frequently used code. Secondly you can add them to your own behaviour library, so it takes just seconds to add functional scripts to your movies. This means faster code development time, which its just what as deadlines approach.

Firstly I will introduce you to the spritenum property. This is a very useful property, as it allows sprites to pretty much take care of themselves.

Introducing the Spritenum Property
1)      Make a scratch graphic castmember using the pain tool.

2)      Drag it in to sprite channel 1

3)      Now, in frame one, add the usual code:

On exitframe
Go to the frame

(this makes it loop on the frame)

5)      Now, make a new script:

property spritenum
on mousedown me
Put "I am in sprite channel" && spritenum
end

6)      Make sure that this new script is set to be a behaviour, and give it a name, such as –Chan display”

7)      Drag and drop the Chan Display behaviour icon onto your bitmap in channel 1 in the score.

Click play.

Click on the graphic on the stage, you will notice that the messagewindow reads -- "I am in sprite channel 1"

Click stop.

Move your graphic down the score to channel 4

Click play

Click on the graphic on the stage, you will notice that the message window now reads -- "I am in sprite channel 4"

Isn't that great? Without changing any code at all, your sprite has automatically changed its behaviour.


How behaviours reduce code.

Now, make several more different scratch graphics and drag and drop them onto frame 1 of the score, in any sprite channel.

Next, drag and drop the same behaviours we just made onto all of them.

Play the movie and click on your different graphics.

You will notice that all the graphics now behave in a similar way, (they all output what channel they are in) but they do not behave in EXACTLY the same way, as each graphic is in its own unique channel.

Notice how there is no more code to write for 10 graphics as there is for 1. This can save a lot of time!

Now, putting the sprite channel isn't very interesting, lets do something cool, by using User Defined Properties.

User Defined Properties.

User defined properties are used in a similar way to global variables, but global variables belong to the whole movie, where as user defined properties are –personal” and belong to that particular sprite.

If we take a group of human beings, the –global” name for these might be –People” or –Humans”. But within that group there may be somebody who's name is –Fred” another person called –Jeff” and there may be two people called –Dave”. There could even be a person who was called –Edward” but likes to be called –Ted”. But the thing is, the name belong to the individual.

So, you could have several rooms full of –humans” but each room would have people with different names in them. The people themselves can change their name if they want to, and if they go into a different room, their name is still the same.

Using GetPropertDescriptionList to make things really move!
Start a new movie, and make some scratch graphics.
Add your:

on exitFrame me
go to the frame
end

script in frame 1

Drag 3 or 4 of your graphics onto different places on the screen.

Now, lets write our new behaviour to get things animated.

We are going to give or sprite a new user defined property called –Speed” that will tell a sprite how fast to go. We will also give it the property Spritenum so that it can refer to itself (I.e. tell itself how fast to go.)

property spritenum
property speed

--Next, we add this great handler:

on getPropertyDescriptionList

description = [:]
addProp description,#speed, [#default:1, #format:#integer, #comment:"How fast should I go?"]

return description
end

Ok, this may look a little scary if you've never seen this handler before, but don't worry, its not so hard.

All you really need to care about is the addprop line, that adds your property to the description list.

#speed is our property name. #Default:1 is the default setting, so if you don't put in a speed value, it will set it to be 1. #Format:#integer is the format that the property should be. #integer means that the property must be a whole number. Instead of just #integer you could have any of the following: #Format:#integer #Format:#float #Format:#string #Format:#symbol #Format:#member #Format:#bitmap #Format:#filmloop #Format:#field #Format:#palette #Format:#picture #Format:#sound #Format:#button #Format:#shape #Format:#movie #Format:#digitalvideo #Format:#script #Format:#richtext #Format:#ole #Format:#transition #Format:#xtra #Format:#frame #Format:#marker #Format:#ink #Format:#Boolean

The most useful are #Format:#integer (whole numbers only) #format:#Boolean (True or false) #format:#float (a floating point number) and #format:#string (a text string)

The #comment part #comment:"How fast should I go?" is added as an aid so that you know what property you are defining. Whatever is in the comment string pops up as a question when you use the behaviour for the first time. The comment is just to remind you what you are doing.

Now, that's your properties sorted out, let's get on to animation.

Putting Exitframe inside sprites.

Most of you are familiar with putting your exitframe script within the score. But did you know that every time you –go to the frame” you pass a message to all the sprites on the stage that says –you are exiting a frame?” It's really handy, because you can use it as a handler. Add this code BENEATH your Getproperydescriptionlist code.

on exitframe me

sprite(spritenum).loch = sprite(spritenum).loch + sprite(spritenum).speed

end

Notice, there is no GO TO THE FRAME, that is only used in your score. This script is done every time the sprite receives the message –you are exiting the frame”

The actual script is simple, it uses the sprites own loch property (that you should already be familiar with) and its NEW speed property that we made earlier! Notice that we use the sprites –speed” in the same way as we use its loch, locv, visibility, height, width etc. Only we made –speed” ourselves, rather than using something built in.

Now, making sure your script is set to behaviour, drop and drag it onto a graphic in the score. You will get a pop up window saying –How fast should I go?” (That's the comment from earlier.) Input a number, 3 is a good one to start with, and click OK.

Now, drop and drag your behaviour onto lots of other graphics in the score, one by one, each time putting a different value for its speed. Try low numbers for slow, high numbers for fast, even negative numbers to go backwards.

Run your movie!

If it has all worked you should see your sprites moving around the stage at different speeds! All with the same piece of code! A great timesaving invention!

Of course, you can really expand on this; this is only a basic demo. Go and experiment.