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MARCH 11, 2004 Anark Studio 2.5
Interactivity I'm a little flabbergasted by the fact that I've come this far into a review of what's billed as an interactive authoring program and mentioned so little on the actual interactive portion of the product. But we're here now, so I might as well say something about it. All interactions in Anark Studio are handled through Behaviors, which, in reality, are simple text files that are written in JavaScript and wrapped inside of an XML document to make it readable as an Anark Studio Behavior (fig. 13). Anark Studio ships with a ton of Behaviors right out of the box in its Storage palette (fig. 14), making it very possible to create relatively complex multimedia programs all through dragging and dropping the included behaviors. In addition to the standards (jump to time, rollovers, go to Web page, etc.), there are a bunch of more advanced Behaviors like collision detection and box constraints available through the drag and drop method as well. Plus, you've also got Behaviors that can add non-linear animation to objects, such as the Sine and Rotator functions, that operate independently of the Timeline. [an error occurred while processing this directive]  Fig. 13: Exciting. A screenshot of code.  Fig. 14: Behaviors abound, so you may not have to code anything yourself. Of course, you can write your own behaviors and use them in Anark Studio if you're one of those Mr. or Ms. Scary Coder Persons. As I mentioned, the format is a simple XML/JavaScript hybrid, and Anark Studio comes with a nice Scripting Reference section in the manual to walk you through the various properties and methods Anark Studio supports. Plus, it's not a limited langauge by any stretch — you can control just about anything through Behaviors, from the creation of primitives on the fly to setting the volume of a sound asset. There's only one "gotcha" when it comes to creating behaviors, and it's just for Mac users. But I'll get to that in the "Disappointments" section. Distribution What's a multimedia program these days without a million ways to view your stuff? Anark Studio certainly doesn't disappoint in this department, with the usual online and offline options. If you want to embed your Anark Media into a Web page, you certainly can do that. Again, the Anark Player (which, if you were good, you have already downloaded and installed) is a plug-in for IE on Windows and Safari and Mozilla/Netscape on the Mac. (Sorry, Windows Mozilla/Firefox users!) If you choose to export your Anark Media to a Web-ready file, Anark Studio will automatically generate the appropriate Object/Embed HTML for you. If you're feeling a little saucy, you can even write behaviors to pass commands to and from the surrounding page, so you can use an Anark movie to control frameset navigation (for example). Of course, if you are deploying for the Web, you have a few options on how to optimize your movies for more efficient download. By default, Anark Studio is going to try to pack the 3D stuff down pretty tight, but you have to do the legwork on imported assets like images and video. Fortunately, you've got options. While video and audio clips are always going to be linked assets and should be compressed accordingly for Web playback, you have the choice of either embedding images into the Anark movie (fig. 15) or linking to an external source file. But overall, you'll find that Anark Studio does really well with compressing its own stuff for online deployment.  Fig. 15: Whether embedding an image or connecting to a source file, you're in charge of how small things potentially get. Prev 1 2 3 4 5 Next Related sites: • Animation Artist • AV Video • Creative Mac • Digital Animators • Digital Game Developer • Digital Media Designer • Digital Producer • Digital Webcast • Presentation Master • The WWUG Related forums: [an error occurred while processing this directive] 
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