[14.1] Like, this is all really complicated stuff only useful to hardened C programmers, right?

No. But IMHO it's easy to get that impression from the Director manuals.

In fact, objects are fairly simple, and the way Director handles them (though lacking some features) is quite approachable.

Essentially, objects are just little collections of data, bundled together with details of all the handlers that can operate on that data. For instance, a simple object might contain a counter variable, and a couple of handlers which increment and display the value of the counter. Multiple instances of such an object could be created, each maintaining its own counter value, but all using the same handlers to increment and display their counter.

The script which tells them how to do this is called a parent script. The process of creating an object from a parent script is called birthing. The main characteristics by which a parent script differs from any other movie script are:

• it must have a name, so that you can refer to it in a birth statement
• it must include a birth handler telling it how to create an object
• it can contain property variable declarations