4-18-2005 Other Updates

Whoa, been a while.
Been busy, nevertheless. First things first:

Everything has been converted to Actionscript 2.0. All of the screen objects I come across (window tiles, tracking nodes, etc.) are now instantiated from base classes that extend the basic movieClip class. We've already seen substantial improvements in development potential, as well as performance and object management.

The conversion of the tracking nodes to objects was highly successful. I have a few base behaviors assigned to the tracking node primitive, described in the external class file trackingNode.as. At movie startup, a set of 40 tracking nodes are instantiated on the stage, with references to the nodes stored in a master list called nodeList. A function in the main movie parses the incoming XML data and invokes a movement method called setCoord on appropriate nodes, which takes care of moving them around the screen. Another behavior tells each node to hide off of the stage when it gets identical data too many times in a row.

When a node is de-assigned in EyesWeb, its coordinates are not unassigned, they are simply left as their last value. This meant that when EyesWeb lost tracking on a given point in the previous setup, it would appear to get stuck on the stage in Flash, holding position until it was reassigned (the actual explanation is a little more complicated but this is a good enough description of the behavior).

The approach involving setting up listeners in flash to handle object updates didn't exactly pan out, though I managed to get around it. Most of the objects that I have built so far are sort of flaky when their internal 'onEnterFrame' scripts are involved. Directly interacting with an object from the main frame script seems to trigger its internal behavior, though - I'll have to do more experimentation to get more reliable results.