Programming with Net-Specific Lingo
Extending Shockave for the Net
By Robert Schmitt
Back in 1987 when the Lingo scripting language was implemented in Macromedia Director, no one thought to include functions for anything beyond the desktop. With the introduction of Shockwave, however, the company needed to take advantage of the Internet's unique features. Happily, Lingo's extensible nature allowed for the addition of many Net-specific Lingo commands that let Shockwave movies connect to HTML pages, talk to Web servers, and retain specific user information.
To illustrate some of Shockwave's Net-specific Lingo commands, I'll show how you can link your site to a chain of Shockwave puzzle mazes, the brainchild of Mark Reijners. Reijners envisions a world of Shockwave puzzle mazes, all linked together by the Web. Solving one maze leads to another maze somewhere else on the Web, and then to another maze, and another...
The Multimaze
I've included one of Reijners' sample mazes. I don't have the space to describe all of the maze code, but I'll detail the main workings.
The maze consists of an opening screen, the maze, and a next-level screen, each of which performs an important function; see Figure 1. When a maze is downloaded, it immediately begins preloading the next maze, to which the user will be sent once this maze is solved. Let's look at how this works.(
