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Create a big project with MMB

The primary usage for MMB is to create small multimedia projects. There are few other better authoring programs for creating huge multimedia projects.

Oh you are still here... OK lets do it with MMB then !

IMPORTANT:
Make sure you are using version 2.01 or newer.

To see the version number go to About box in designer. Version 2.01 was released 14th of September 1998. Are you registered user and you don't have 2.01 ?. Contact me.

1. Forgot about putting everything into one mbd file!
You have to divide the project to logical blocks otherwise you will be not able to manage this. You will be not able to load the project to the designer and user will not be able to load your creation into the memory.
You might think to put EACH page into separate file if your pages are very heavy on graphic- you using alot of big graphic objects on one page.

2. Organize your files before you start doing anything.
For example we are going to make huge CD project with many graphic objects on each page. So we decide to put each page into separate mbd file to speed up the loading, less memory consumption and better manipulating.

The autorun.exe file will be in the root of the CD.
The mbd pages we will put into the directory \Pages on the CD, not to have them in the root.
We will use some sound so let's put the wave files into \Sound directory

We would like to have our CD like this:

We will create a 'CD Master" on our hardisk - if you don't have free root you can create some directory like this:
d:\MyNewCD
And create Pages and Sound directory there.

3. Starting point
The starting point should be the first active page from where user can jump to different pages etc...
Lets call it Menu and the file will be menu.mbd
We will put it to the Pages directory.

The menu will call different 'pages' but each page is in separate file in this project.
Lets create first 'page' Overview and we will save it into the file overview.mbd again in the directory Pages

To go from menu to overview you cannot use NextPage or Page commands! Now they are in different files !
You can use only
RunMBD("<SrcDir>\Pages\overview.mbd","")

Note:
See I used <SrcDir>\Pages\, but booth files menu.mbd and overview.mbd are in the same Pages directory. Is that correct?
YES!!! Because <SrcDir> is not path to mbd file but path to the PLAYER. And player (autorun.exe) is or will be in the root of CD!
Understand ?

To go from the Overview back to the menu we will use
RunMBD("<SrcDir>\Pages\menu.mbd","")
If you don't know why read the Note again.

...and so one

4. Creating other pages
Now that's easy, just few months of work with photoshop and we have all the kix graphic and text.
We can move between our 'pages' with RunMBD command and we know why we put everywhere
<SrcDir>\Pages\
before the name of the file.

Sound
We will copy all wave files into Sound directory - because we want them there!
And we will use for sound path all the time <SrcDir>\Sound\
For example: <SrcDir>\Sound\beep.wav

How to test This kind of project?
From designer nothing is working! Sound is not playing and it doesn't go to the next file !!! HEEEELP...

For that we have InPlace testing.
Go to the menu Settings - Testing from designer and click the second option 'Run external player in the location" and select your Master Root directory
For example: we have our "Master CD" on D:\MyNewCD so we want to test the file there.

5. The autorun
So wahat is then in the autorun.exe if everything is in the Pages directory?
Well it can be anything for example:

• One dummy page and on Page Start script we wrote RunMBD("<SrcDir>\Pages\menu.mbd","")
• Two pages project - on the first we display the Splash scren and set PageTimer("1000","") and on the second we put RunMBD("<SrcDir>\Pages\menu.mbd","")
• etc..

So whatever we do on this 'Zero' project it must on the end be anyway RunMBD("<SrcDir>\Pages\menu.mbd","") to go to the menu.mbd
Then we compile just this small dummy/not_so_dummy page as a Stand-alone autorun.exe fileto to our "Master CD" on D:\MyNewCD\
Remember - we will be not able to go back to this dummy page from other files.

That's it!

You can create your huge multimedia CD now ....

Happy hugemultimediabuilding!

Oscar

P.S. Before you start doing something - try to read first two sentences from the top of this document again ...