Director @ Night

Updated Shockwave 11.5 is Under Development

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.

3 comments March 31st, 2009

Hotfix update for Shockwave (and Director…soon)

An updated version of Shockwave was posted last week, and a hotfix for Director will be posted early this week.

Release Notes for Shockwave 11.0.3.470.

Release Notes for Shockwave 11.0.3.470

Shockwave build number: 11.0.3.470

1) Kerning was not available in Director 11.

Kerning is implemented for the font types supported by Director 11.

2) There were additional spaces at the end of the line when text was justified.

Bug is fixed. Justification of text correctly takes into account spaces at the end of the line.

3) When the sprite width was greater than 1536 pixels, text was not rendered properly. A black patch appeared in the text window\text sprite in some cases.

This issue is fixed for text sprites whose width and the height is greater than 1536 pixels.

4) Director used to crash when the following fonts were applied to the text sprite. (Mac OS 10.5)

• ApplySymbols
• Papyrus
• Papyrus condensed
• STHeiti( Light)
• STHeiti( Regular )
• Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro
• Hiragino Mincho Pro
• STFangSong
• LiSong Pro
• STSong
• STKaiti

This issue has been fixed.

5) Certain custom icons appeared fuzzy on the projector.

This issue has been fixed.

6) Changes to the value for friction and restitution of rigid bodies after collision did not have any effect on the Physics World.

This issue has been fixed.

7) When force was applied to a rigid body in a Physics World, a spin was observed.

This is because the rigid body always has an affinity towards the world axis.

A new rigid body property, called axisAffinity, has been added. The value of the axisAffinity property is true by default. The affinity towards the world axis is compensated by setting the property to false. When you set the property to false, the spin is not observed.

The computations are more when axisAffinity is false; set the property to false only when required.

Sample code snippet

aball = pDynamiks.createRigidBody(ball.name,ball.name,#sphere,#dynamic)
aball.mass=1000
aball.sleepThreshold = 100
aball.friction= 1
aball.restitution = 0
aball.axisAffinity = false

8 ) The Maintain Proportion option in the Sprite’s scale dialog box, and Transform bitmap dialog box, did not produce the required results in Director on a MAC 10.4 G5 machine.

This issue has been fixed for both the dialog boxes.

9) Externally linked Scripts got deleted when external files had MAC line ending characters.

This problem occurred when a text file created on MAC with MAC line endings was imported to a Windows machine and saved. This issue has been fixed.

10) On a computer running on Windows Vista, Flash and Shockwave content on the same HTML page were not able to communicate.

This issue has been fixed.

11) The value of timestep and substep was not ignored in the Automatic time step mode while initializing the Physics body.

Automatic time step is supposed to take the elapsed time for advancing the Physics World simulation. This was not working properly for all values of time step.

12) Physics Xtra throws an error when the value for the timestep and substep parameters is zero in the Automatic time step mode.

This is a valid value for automatic time step and no error is thrown when you specify a value of zero. However, zero values for timestep and substep are invalid for other modes and the error will be shown.

13) Memory leak when models were cloned using cloneModelFromCastMember() and resetworld()

Models and texture files were not cleaned as intended when cloneModelFromCastMember() and resetworld() were used. This resulted in a small memory leak.

14) Downloading a new version of the custom Xtra did not replace the previous version after the user closed the browser

When a user plays a Shockwave movie that requires the latest version of a custom Xtra, the custom Xtra is downloaded to the user’s computer in the same location as the previous version of the Xtra. The new Xtra is placed in a folder named New. This happens only when a previous version of the custom Xtra exists on the computer.

When the user closes the browser, the new version should replace the previous custom Xtra and the “New” folder should get deleted. This was not happening and has been fixed now.

The new custom Xtra replaces the previous version when:

• The user closes the browser.
• The Shockwave player is opened in a new instance of the browser. This happens, if for some reason, the Shockwave player did not unload the new Custom Xtra when the user closed the browser.

Feature Enhancement

rayCastAll method in Physics(Dynamiks xtra) takes an optional parameter for sorting the returned list.

Usage

<list> world.rayCastAll(vector origin,vector direction,[[#sorted:#distance]])

Description

This method returns references of all the rigid bodies or terrains that are found along the ray from the specified origin and specified direction. The method also returns the point of contact, contact normal, and the distance from the origin of the ray.

Parameters

parameter Description

Origin Required. Vector that specifies the origin of the raycast direction Required. Vector that specifies the direction of the raycast.

[#sorted:#distance] Optional list. Specifies that the returned list should be sorted on distance

Return parameter

This method returns a list containing a list having the following information:

• Rigid body / Terrain reference
• Contact Point
• Contact Normal
• Distance of the rigid body or terrain, from the origin of the ray.

Example

‐‐Lingo Syntax

lstraycast = member(“PhysicsWorld”).rayCastAll (vector(10,0,0),vector(0,0,1))

‐‐Returns an unsorted list containing the above parameters

put lstraycast

lstraycast = member(“PhysicsWorld”).rayCastAll (vector(10,0,0),vector(0,0,1),[#sorted:#distance])

‐‐Returns an sorted list containing the above parameters

put lstraycast

//JavaScript Syntax

var lstraycast = member(“PhysicsWorld”).rayCastAll (vector(10,0,0),vector(0,0,1));

‐‐Returns a unsorted list containing the above parameters

put(lstraycast);

lstraycast = member(“PhysicsWorld”).rayCastAll (vector(10,0,0),vector(0,0,1),

propList(symbol(“sorted”),symbol(“distance”)));

//Returns a sorted list containing the above parameters

put(lstraycast);

1 comment November 10th, 2008

Shockwave for Vista Update Coming Soon

I talked about using Director in a session at the eLearning Guild 2007 Conference last week and it was announced (by Rick Jones from Adobe) that there will be an update for Vista later this month in the Shockwave Plug-in. Several sessions talked about using Director for Immersive Learning Simulations (ILS), particularly for the multiuser web-based content.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that a MacIntel version will show up before the school year starts. At least a beta version over on Adobe Labs.

A few more thoughts from the conference later this week.

2 comments April 17th, 2007

iShell Targets Director Users

Tribalmedia announced an updated version of their multimedia authoring tool called iShell. One of the key features being touted is the fact that this version is now a Universal Binary.

iShell 4.5 brings native support for Mac OS X on Intel chips as well as for PowerPC chips running on Mac OS X 10.3.9 or greater. This brings great speed enhancements for iShell on the Macintosh platform and keeps iShell moving forward into the future.

Tribalmedia is offering crossgrades for current Director users with a relatively low cost.

I really hope Adobe takes this as a bit of a push to get Director moving forward in the near future. Microsoft and Adobe are the last two companies to get major products released for the Intel-based Macs. Of course, their software has been around for many years (lots of older code), and is pretty large (just think of the lines of code for Photoshop).

I still dream about the day I won’t have to use Rosetta mode to view Shockwave content.

7 comments January 11th, 2007

Next Version of Director in 2007

From a mailing list I’m not on (I can’t believe it!) I see that the next version of Director was confirmed by Tom Higgins. You can see what was said in the mailing list message on this blog.

2007 is sounding better every day.

6 comments July 9th, 2006

Director/Shockwave update, Flash 8 Xtra

Feel like using Flash 8 content for projectors and shockwave content? Updates have been released for these. Get far more info on the Director downloads page.

4 comments March 22nd, 2006