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OK Wiz, here's a progress report.
I loaded all my former clam pieces and experiments into Lightwave and realized I had to change my plan slightly on how to animate them. No big deal, but they will need an intermediate position between open and closed. As the clam closes, the blue "meat" needs to clear the teeth of the shell, so it has to arc out of the way, instead of the linear movement from one position to the other. I put together some more tests, and found that the bare shell didn't look convincing in its closed position. So, I went to the local aquarium store and bought an empty clam shell to photograph. I still haven't got the lighting exactly right, but it will work.
At about that point I had a conference call with Prolific, and was informed that they are talking to several publishers to take the place of Encore, and we'll need a Gold Master disk soon. Now, the first batch of CDs that are produced will just be a copy of the latest Beta at that point, and then the customers will be encouraged to come and get free updates. But there are still some functions which I'm not comfortable turning loose on the general public in their current state. Sure, it would be nice to have the clams working, but they are not really vital. So I decided to put them on hold and spend a day implementing a better music interface and a Logo interface.
The internal workings of the Logo interface will be nearly identical to the music interface, so I tackled the music first. Each time someone has complained about the music pausing before it starts, or some other problem, Edgar has added a level of checks and indirection until the sound system is unbelievably difficult to follow. A day became two, then three, then four. I think I finally got it, though. The user can now open up the Music dialog box, click on any song in the list, preview it, and move it up or down in the list. The Logo playlist will be very similar, with the addition of being able to set the number of seconds that each logo will play.
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