Question

I recently had a client contact me asking for an update to his project that I used to maintain/develop years ago.

It was done using Macromedia Director (now Adobe Director) and Lingo. Since I haven’t developed anything using these technology in such a long time I need some assistance.

The majority of the changes are simple, but what has got me stumped is making the application be able to toggle between full-screen projector and windowed-mode.

This is how it is organised:

• I have a stub projector, which is lightweight and ensures a quick start-time.
• The stub projector loads the main movie. ("@::Content:Main")
• This stub projector is published with in full-screen mode.

Now, I can create a projector that is windowed and one that is full-screen mode by publishing separate executables. However what the client wants is the ability to switch this at runtime – is this even possible?

I have found a few workarounds that kinda work (setting the display-rect and stage-rect to the desktop size) but introduce numerous compatibility issues.

Any advice? Solutions?

I am tempted to say that it isn’t possible to switch at runtime and recommend that he publishes either a full-screen or a windowed version.

Answer 1

For future reference: http://www.directorforum.com/showthread.php?p=38795#post38795

Well there are different ways to
define “full screen”, but all can be
done at runtime:

1) The projector automatically adjusts
the computer’s display resolution to
match the dimensions of the movie and
hides the taskbar/dock. This is
generally what “full screen” means in
modern parlance. You can check out
various Xtras for switching the
resolution on the fly.

2) In Director terms, publishing a
projector ‘full screen’ just means
that the projector window has no
titlebar, takes up the full dimensions
of the display, hides the
taskbar/dock, and has the movie
content centered on screen framed by a
solid background color. This is a
pretty lame implementation of full
screen since it doesn’t make the movie
appear any bigger onscreen. This can
be set at runtime by manipulating the
rects that you mention and using an
Xtra to hide the taskbar. Not sure
what “compatibility issues” you ran
into.

3) Graphically stretch the movie so
that its actual content takes up the
entire screen. The easiest way to do
this is by altering the drawRect. But
this can result in distorted graphics
depending on how much stretching is
occurring, since no antialiasing is
used to smooth the stretched pixels.