Expert on PC, newbie on Mac - Xtras

Question

Hi
I develope director apllications on PC for over 10 years.
Now my customer wants to port couple of applications, made
for PC, on mac
platform
As I understand, the problem is to rewrite everything, wat is
done with
xtras and script, that contains relative pathes to external
files
My questions concerns more to xtras field
Under windows we have just one file *.x32 for an Xtra and
call functions
from ist or use its features
But on Mac there are two different files for xtra - one for
PowerMac and one
for Intel Mac.
My questions are:
1) do I have to create a version of the project for each Mac
platform, and
place in xtras folder just specific version of xtra(PowerMac
or Intel Mac)
or can I create one version of project and copy both files
into xtras folder
and system will load need file during playback
2) If there are no version of Intel Mac Xtra available - can
the project be
started just under Rosetta emulator?
3) Can director application under Mac export and dynamically
load JPG
files(which Xtra can be used for this purpose under Mac)
4) Under PC I use budapi xtra for checking if the director
application
window is the toppest window and move it to top if it is not.
Relevant
funktions are available just for windows. How can be this
funktionaliti
realised under Mac
Any Help will be appreciated
Thank you in advance
Game_dev
P.S. Please be indulgent if the questions are not correct or
were answered
100 times. I'm realy new to MAC but need information as soon
as possible to
make estimation of portation to this system

Answer 1

It's probably not one for PPC and another for Intel - It's
more likely one for OSX and one for OS 9x (or Classic). OS9 is
pretty much obsolete now. Unless the client really wants it to work
on 8 year old Macs you could probably do without it.
1.) One projector will work with PowerMac and Intel Macs -
they just both need to have OS X.
If you download an xtra it should have a 'Cross platform
resource' folder with the counterpart to your platforms version of
the xtra and instructions of how to paste a line into the
xtrainfo.txt file (which is in 'Macromedia
DirectorMX2004\Configuration\'. Or if you're using openXlib to fire
up your xtras I think you'll have to make a corresponding folder
for the Mac xtras and choose which platforms extra to call by using
the platform function - check whether it contains "mac" and then
open the right file that way.
2.) As the latest version of Director is MX2004, it pre-dates
the Intel Macs so it's always considered as a PowerPC application -
which run fine for me.
3.) You can use buddyAPI to get file names and use regular
lingo to generate new cast members and set the filenames/paths from
the ones. Also I set the file path delimiter by checking the
platform property.
if the platform contains "mac" then
delim=":"
else
delim="\"
end if
set Files = baFileList( the moviepath&"graphics", "*.*"
mymem=new(value(#bitmap), castLib("graphics"))
prevdelim=the itemdelimiter
mymem.name=lname.item[lname.item.count]
mymem.filename=the
moviepath&"graphics"&delim&files[m]
This is just snipped from a bigger behavior I'm using, but
the nuts and bolts are there. One thing to watch out for is
filename lengths - Mac and Windows deal with long file names
differently - to be on the safe side, keep your filenames under 33
characters including the extension (I think thats the safe limit
anyway). Otherwise you'll could try using Buddy again to figure out
long and short file names.
4.) Never tried it, but you could maybe do it with
_player.frontwindow and movetofront()
It can be a bit of a headache at first, but once you get used
to what to look out for it gets easier.
Hope this helps