if you run 800x600 screen res For the love of all things good and holy, Nige... you're doing all your production on an 800x600 screen?!? You must have the patience and resolve of a mule! (Not to call you a mule, of course). Impressive, I get frustrated working on projects with my 1024x768 screen... ESPECIALLY within flash when I have a bunch of different panels and windows floating around. Somehow my actions panel always ends up getting closed... arg! Anyway, concerning your question: I don't think Director has any permissions for controlling the z-index of windows.

yeah i know what you mean about working in Flash, if the library and properties is open i'm left with a little tiny view, open the actions and every thing above it disappears lol, thank god i don't do lots of AS! on 1024 our monitor starts going wonky.. maybe i should sell the bike and get a decent computer! :idea: just thought i'd ask :wink: *just realised.. Greg's called me a mule and a b**tard all in one week!.. he's obviously getting to know me!* :P

Hmm, I don't know if I should resurrect this, and actually I don't know either if my suggestions aren't already implemented, but here they go anyway. :idea: Vertical Room Scrolling. I've searched the forum and apparently nobody has asked for it yet, so it may be possible already and I just don't know how to do it. Please confirm :? :idea: Cast Interactions That is, being able to interact with the "inactive" playable characters; this can be worked around, I guess, but it would be a nice touch not having to add a "non-playable" version of the character as a sprite in every room. :idea: Built-In Foregrounds and Backgrounds I think it would be rather easy to add some kind of parallax effects to the rooms, by adding some more "reserved" foreground and background layers to the editor; these could have an automatic diferential motion, relative to their sizes in comparison with the main background.

Hey GP, thanks for the feedback. No prob on digging out old forums. That's why they're here. In RE: * Vertical scrolling: I've had it in mind, although it's a novelty enough feature that I don't plan to implement it unless I see a brilliantly simple way to repurpos the horizontal scrolling logic... which may prove entirely possible (logic is fun like that!). So, I guess I'm not planning to investing unique development on it. * Cast Interactions: there's already a light-weight system in place for this. When you do "changePlayerChar", a shadow sprite is inserted into the character's last room. Its sprite name matches it's cast name. I don't know if I ever added a custom API to hack interaction with the shadow though. Shouldn't be hard though, you just need to trigger a global sequence. * Paralax Scrolling: very cool. This would be a darn cool feature. I do like the "layer" idea in general. We'll see what happens.

control for room enter/exit events. Most common would be that when you enter a room, as it fades in you can see the character walking a bit, to kind of keep the flow from leaving one room to entering the next I was searching for this, for it's really useful to tell your story ... I had to build small invisible swf files that start playing and activate an action automatically when a room is started for the very first time. Like a movie sequence or a dialogue that is done without user interaction. Afterwards that swf is deactivated by changing its sprite to an empty phase 2 - that way it won't repeat all that you saw next time you enter the room. For exit it could be on the "exit room" sprite. But what about the enter events? (In Lassie Director you wouldn't be able to put this in the room before (on the exit sprite) because no TIMes are executed after the "change room" command.) Just curious :)

My very wish is that LASSIE can make improvement for checking any error before saving (or probably just ignoring the errors). The most disturbing thing in LASSIE as far as I know that if I make mistake in LASSIE...LASSIE will display a message and only offering a way to quit. That means repeating the entire project from the beginning...:) The problem I've been through that the conversation editor allows a strange character to put (ex : ENTER character)...and after saving the project, suddenly LASSIE will display error message and none I can do about it. I'm not sure that this is the one that cause the problem, but I have a very big suspiscious about this. the thing I've done right now to solve this problem is I have to back-up my project from time to time. And still gambling about error in the next minute. May God hears my wish :).

I'm totally rooting for the vertical scrolling feature; I loved that annoying programmable crystal puzzle scene in The Dig.

Hmmm... well, enter/exit room events are already available in LassieAS. As for "lots of errors"... mrrrh, yeah. That's Director for you. It's a pretty unstable platform. Flash is much more robust. And vertical scrolling? we'll see.

Alright.... I don't know much about how you programed LASSIE..... but wouldn't it be possible to use the horizontal scroll, and just change it to do the same thing vertically? I mean you would just need a radial button to decided if it scrolls horizontally or vertically. I'm sure that doing both would be code-suicide.... but I can't imagine just switching betweent the two is too difficult.

Yes, a callback to my earlier statement: ... plan to implement it unless I see a brilliantly simple way to repurpos the horizontal scrolling logic... which may prove entirely possible (logic is fun like that!).

ah.... my fault I miss read that to be the opposite.... then was wondering why the "(logic is fun like that)" didn't make sense :-D

Whoever thought up the idea of a speed matrix was brilliant. It's fantastic! (yes, I'm playing with a working build of it)

Was that John? (that's just who my memory calls up)

I know you could probably rig this up in LASSIE as it is, but a simple Text Parser might be nice. Since I'm out of any good book to read, lately i,v been reduced to playing archaic text based adventure games, actually some of them are quite good, although usually the puzzles have a illogical (at least to me) solution. I would love to be able to easily make a graphical text based adventure, a Text-Parser that assigns actions to keywords Dependant on room would be just the ticket