Archive for March, 2009
From Allen on various mailing lists:
Just an update, as I know many are interested. Early next week we plan to deliver a fix for the text line spacing (height) issue in Shockwave 11.5 to the Shockwave pre-release testers. Expect a Shockwave update following that session. Normally such cycles take a minimum of two weeks. (We added a permanent Shockwave pre-release beta testing group, which will always be able to activate for various Shockwave updates.)
Danny K, a couple of the imaging lingo errors you reported were verified and marked to fix, but aren’t planned for this short term update. Apparently they existed in 11 as well. (performance issue on 8 bit imaging objects)
Sound concerns re the removed audio compression settings on export. The simple answer is that mp3 files are substantially more optimized and are the preferred file format in order to deal with pre-compressing audio. I think the larger community concern is that legacy projects may contain high volumes of wav files and that absent the ability to “compress at once” and store in cast it becomes untenable to imagine dealing with huge stores of files to convert to mp3. I’ve asked engineering to give me some options / perhaps a white paper for handling conversion as such. I imagine that it would be simple enough to simply write a widget in Director now that we can save mp3 etc. to just rip through the sounds in a project and save all the wavs as mp3 sounds. I’ll let you know when I either get something back substantial, or I come up with some kind of pipeline myself. Perhaps others have given this some thought as well.
March 31st, 2009
When Director 11 was released last year it really didn’t seem to get mentioned anywhere. It wasn’t until a few months ago that it showed up on MacUpdate. Things are quite different this time.
Shockwave 11.5 has been in the top 5 of the MacUpdate Most Popular downloads since it came out. Director 11.5 got covered on MacNN, MacWorld, and Macsimum News. (Can you tell I’m a Mac guy?)
The screenshots from a few moments ago show the Director story was very popular on MacWorld, and Shockwave is currently #4 in the weekly downloads on MacUpdate.
It seems as if the Adobe PR department has been much busier with this version of Director than they were with the last. That seems to be a very good sign that Director is here to stay for a bit longer.
March 26th, 2009
A new version of Director was released today, along with a new version of Shockwave.
You can download Director, Shockwave, as well as many demos at this location (you’ll need to login with your Adobe ID).
Let the fun begin!
Update: Director 11.5 can also be found on Amazon.
Update 2: List of features:
- Enriched audio capabilities Make your games sound as real as they look with 5.1-channel surround sound, real-time mixing, audio effects, and DSP filters.
- Enhanced video capabilities Enhance your user’s multimedia experience using H.264-video integration that provides full-screen, high-definition video in multimedia applications and games.
- New 3D importer for SketchUp Rapidly create rich 3D environments using the many ready-made 3D models available through Google SketchUp.
- Streaming support Stream audio and video over the Internet using RTMP support.
- New data type Access and manipulate binary data using the ByteArray data type.
- Enhanced physics engine Support for dynamic concave rigid bodies.
- Enhanced productivity Support for multiple undo/redo operations.
- Cross domain policy
- Enhancements to the text engine
- Open Type Font (OTF) embedding support on Macintosh OS.
- Class-based kerning support.
- Hinting support at a member level.
- Enhancements to platform and browser support
- Macintosh OSX 10.5 (authoring and runtime) support.
- Firefox 3.0 support.
More information can be found on DirectorForum in this thread.
March 23rd, 2009
The uDevGames contest recently announced the winners. The contest is “iDevGames’ unique grass-roots initiative to highlight our community to gamers, as well as a development platform capable of producing the most innovative cross-platform titles in the industry.”
Constellation (created with Director) won 2nd place in the Best Overall, Best Gameplay, and Best Presentation categories!
Congratulations Matthew!
March 18th, 2009
For those that develop games and are going to the Games Developer Conference in San Francisco next week be sure to go to the Director-related session. It will be held on Wednesday March 25, 2009 from 10:30-11:30am. The session description says:
Allen Partridge, Adobe Systems, hosts professional 3D game developers Pieter Albers and Diederick Groesbeek, Xform Games, Malachy Duffin, CanDo Interactive, Steve Becerra and Richard Chala, Mockworld, and David Mullich, Spin Master demonstrating & discussing design and development strategies for creating profitable, high-performance games for the web. Topics include technology challenges, design approach, business advantage & browser-based 3D.
I wonder if Director 11.5 will get shown at that time? Hmm…fits in well with the April 4th shipping date on Amazon.
March 15th, 2009
This past week a FOSE 2009 took place. I’m not sure what FOSE stands for but the event was a technology tradeshow and conference for government IT. Someone from Adobe was speaking and said that there are about 200,000 Director developers.
Is that number larger than you thought? Smaller? Needless to say, this sparked a bit of discussion on the Direct-L mailing list this week. Does the number indicate “active” developers? People that occasionally use Director to maintain old content? Hard to say.
Several people that run sites talked about their stats*, and that brought up more issues. I personally know that stats can “show” most anything you choose. Using Google stats you can at least be sure you have the same program doing the analysis. 🙂
German Directorforum
Absolute Unique Visitors: 290,512 (1 year)
International Directorforum
Absolute Unique Visitors: 22,195 (11 months since launch)
Dean’s Director Tutorials
Absolute Unique Visitors: almost 65,000 (1 year)
And here at Director @ Night
Absolute Unique Visitors: 18,484 (11 months, was down for 1 month)
So what does this mean? Hard to say. I do know that this site does very little, but I still get visitors. I’d love to see stats on the Adobe Forums. Personally I think the 200k number is a bit high, but I would be willing to go with 100k. The bigger item of interest (to us Director developers) will be what happens to this number in the next few years as the new versions of Director get released. Amazon still shows Director 11.5 for April 4th. Adobe has been at the Game Developers Conference the past two years, so marketing is increasing. I even saw an ad for Director on my gmail page.
So are there 200,000 Director developers out there? As a Magic 8-ball might say, “Ask again later.”
*Stats are from Martin and Dean on Direct-L
March 15th, 2009