nightwares mini logoA brief introduction to Director

4. Setting the Stage

The very first thing you need to do is pay attention to your Stage size. Scaling the Stage to fit an unexpected monitor resolution is possible but does not yield very satisfactory results.

Director 8.5 Shockwave Studio: A Beginner's Guide

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The default size of 640 by 480 pixels works fine if you want to fill the screen on a VGA monitor or on a larger Mac monitor (specifically the 13" and 14" screens).

However, there is a particular type of monitor distributed with earlier Macs that does not have that resolution, the AppleColor 12" monitor.

Furthermore, the Color Mac Classic is incapable of that sort of pixel resolution as well. If you want to maintain maximum backward-compatibility, you will design your program with these systems in mind.

The simplest solution is to set your Stage size to fit the smaller color Mac displays (this will leave a frame around the Stage on larger monitors, but there are ways to deal with that, which we will go into in later parts).

Under Director 4, you use the "Preferences..." dialog from the "File" menu to set this; under Director 5+ you select the "Properties..." sub-item from the "Movie" item in the "Modify" menu.

Set your Stage size to 512 pixels wide by 384 pixels high. These are the dimensions of the smallest Mac color monitors and will fit on all color-capable Macs or PCs with VGA displays.


1. Introduction

2. Definition of Objectives

3. Specific Objectives

4. Stage Size

5. Stage Location

6. Setting the Stage's Color

7. Beginning to Enter Script

8. A bit More About the StartMovie() Handler

9. Entering Another Handler

10. A Break-down of the CheckColor() Handler

11. A Quick Test

12. Adding Text to the Stage

13. Preparing to Enter a Frame Script

14. Entering the Frame Script

15. Adding a Quit Button

16. The Progress so Far

17. Preparing to Add a Menu

18. Discussion of Menu Requirements

19. Preparing the Menu Storage Member

20. Entering Menu Functions for Macintosh

21. Entering Menu Functions for Windows

22. Efficientlly Handling Multiple Menus

23. Preparing to Insert the Menus Onscreen

24. Adding the Menu Installation Handler

25. Discussion of the Menu Installation Handler

26. Adding Code for an About Box

27. Review of the Scripts

28. Creating a Projector and Running it