alwaysBuffer not set...

[Richard Gaskin]

Wouter wrote:
>> The engine has no "face" of its own; that is, it has no windows or other
>> visible UI components of its own.  It has only the Transcript
>> interpreter and a handful of data resources the interpeter needs (such
>> as the list of color names, month names, etc.).
>>
>> Any visible element, such as a window, menu, etc., is part of the IDE.
>
> But it is the engine that provides them according to it's own drawing 
> routines or calls to the system it thrives on.

Yes indeed.  Think of it as the DNA for making objects, rather than the 
objects themselves.

>> One of the reasons you may need to use the Resource Mover to copy the
>> Ask and Answer dialogs and other components into your stack before
>> building is that they live in mctools.mc.  Once your stack is a
>> standalone it no longer has access to stacks in mctools.mc.
> 
> Being used to resourceforks the older Mac programmers had to redefine 
> the word *resource mover* :^)

Ah, but the word "resource" in computing had a much more generic meaning 
long before Mac OS.  MetaCard's vernacular uses this more common 
meaning, not specifically limited to the Mac OS file format's resource 
fork, more in keeping with the vernacular common to the majority of 
supported platforms.

>> So when it comes to the template objects, those are handled by the
>> engine.  It is possible, however, for any script to modify the
>> properties of a template object so that any future objects created will
>> have that property, which appears to be what the Rev IDE is doing with
>> graphics.
> 
> I agree that they are handled or used by the engine.
> But the question still remains: where are those default template objects 
> physically (it's data) stored?
> In the binary of the engine or in the binary of one or more stacks?

Template objects are never stored per se; they live only in memory.  The 
property settings which define them are, in my understanding, hard-wired 
into the code of the engine, and not in any stack file.

However, any script can change the default engine properties of template 
objects, which appears to be what Rev's initialization script does.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
  ___________________________________________________
  Rev tools and more:  http://www.fourthworld.com/rev