Re: OT: Shockwave >Anybody seen this?

[John Dowdell]

At 10:21 AM 7/16/98, Wayne Townsend wrote:

>Has anybody seen a shockwave app that allows the user to draw/type on top

>of an image?  It has to be saved back on the server?


There have been many painting applications done in Director -- Alan Levine

has contributed a handling on Director Web, and searching the DIRECT-L and

DOUG archives should turn up some more hits.


Saving an image back to the server is a different issue, however. As Aaron

Cushing pointed out, a Projector can include an Xtra for screen captures.

But when playing back from the millions of already-distributed Shockwave

players it can be difficult to arrange new extensions for each and every

player.


Another approach is to store the instructions to make the image, rather

than to store the image itself. For instance, in Director you can trail a

brush-like sprite on screen to paint, but for better results many

developers capture brush locations into a list and then smoothly

interpolate between these samples.


The data would be stored in a list such as

  set thisStroke to [point(240, 260), point(244, 258), point(248, 255)...]


You could send each stroke's data back to the server through CGI-style

appends to a getNetText call, as in:

  set thisNetOp to

getNetText("http://www.myplace.com/cgi?stroke=[point(240, 260)...]")

Brush color and optional brush style can also be sent back this way.


(Note: Browsers impose differing limits on the possible size of query terms

appended to an URL... for very long strokes you might need to break up the

location data into two distinct calls after a thousand characters or so.)


This is a different *representation* of image data on the server.


If the user choose an image and then types above it, you could store

different data, such as the image chosen, where they clicked to type, what

font they chose, the letters, etc. This could all be sent back from the

Shockwave movie in the same way.


Might something like this be appropriate for this job...?


jd





John Dowdell, Macromedia Tech Support, San Francisco CA US


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