MultiUser Xtra Help

Question

Director / Lingo Community,
I'm attempting to do something fairly simple with the
MultiUser Xtra, but can not find any documentation on how to
accomplish this. To put it in simplest terms, I'd like to have
director projectors running on 4 PCs sitting in a wait state. I
will have a fifth computer setup with Director that will have a
basic start button. When pressing this button I would like the
other 4 Director projectors to start playing. Then once they are
done, they return to their wait state. It seems like a simple thing
to do with some network calls, and I *think* the multiuser xtra
could handle this. Can anyone point me in the right direction or
offer some basic coding help? I'm up against a tight deadline.
Thanks in advance for any help.
Charles

Answer 1

Yes, the MUS xtra can do this. There could be other ways as
well, but it
would not be too difficult using the MUS xtra either. If you
are going
to use a peer-to-peer method I think all the machines would
need to be
on the same LAN (or each host projector would need to be on
an a
different LAN). Otherwise you would have to use the actual
MUS Server
which makes it more complicated. I myself don't have much
experience
with the MUS Server, but I have used the MUS Xtra to create
p2p
applications.
The basic idea is as follows. Your four projector would each
be running
an instance of the xtra in 'host' mode (using the
WaitForNetConnection
function). Your 5th projector would start four instances of
the Xtra as
a client(connectToNetServer), with each instance connecting
to one of
the projectors running as host.
After all of the connections are up, then you could easily
send messages
from the 5th projector to one or more of the host projectors
telling
them to do anything you wanted (play a video, run an
animation, whatever).
In my learning process, one of the learning sources I found
was a sample
movie the demonstrates making a simple connection.
http://poppy.macromedia.com/multiuser/archive-99-12-03/openlingo/PeerConnMinimal/
I might be able to offer you some assistance (as time
permits). I
learned quite a bit about using the MUS Xtra to a create P2P
application, specifically one that uses multiple instance of
the Xtra in
a single movie similar to what you are doing. I wrote what I
believe is
a fairly decent Parent Script for creating generic client and
server
instances of the xtra. The script handles all of the basic
(required)
portions of making the connection and allows you to add any
custom
messages handlers need on top of that.
Good luck, let me know if you want to talk off the forum.
Dave
TDHCharles wrote:
> Director / Lingo Community,
>
> I'm attempting to do something fairly simple with the
MultiUser Xtra, but can
> not find any documentation on how to accomplish this. To
put it in simplest
> terms, I'd like to have director projectors running on 4
PCs sitting in a wait
> state. I will have a fifth computer setup with Director
that will have a basic
> start button. When pressing this button I would like the
other 4 Director
> projectors to start playing. Then once they are done,
they return to their
> wait state. It seems like a simple thing to do with some
network calls, and I
> *think* the multiuser xtra could handle this. Can anyone
point me in the right
> direction or offer some basic coding help? I'm up
against a tight deadline.
>
> Thanks in advance for any help.
>
> Charles
> SupD
>