Director @ Night

Dean on Director Podcast

I’ve heard that Dean Utian (from Dean’s Director Tutorials and Resources) was interviewed on the most recent Director Podcast. Be sure to drop by Magicgate Software’s Director Podcast Site for a great listen.

Add comment June 1st, 2006

To Chocolate Infinity & Beyond w/ Director

Is this a picture of me at the latest club dancing the night away? I can’t say it is, but it is a picture from a project that was recently completed using Director located at Cadbury World across the lake in Birmingham, UK.

The development team at HMC Media Lab used 3 computers networked together with a shock sensitive floor and motion tracking to make interactive chocolatey graphics at Cadburys World theme park in the UK. Director was used to create “custom software from the ground up and installed it across three computer processors at the nerve centre of the installation.”

As you enter the infinity room a giant chocolate bar melts into gloopy puddles beneath you and, when you jump in them, chocolate splashes all over the floor. Then a sprinkling of individual Roses chocolates appear beneath your feet. You won’t believe your eyes when they unwrap as you tread on them but as you step off they wrap back up.

I’m always amazed by what one can do with Director. Now, if I make it over to to the UK I’ll be sure to stop by. Mmmm…..chocolate — Homer Simpson.

10 comments May 23rd, 2006

ExploreLearning Snags Codie

ExploreLearning won a Codie Award last night in the Best Instructional Solution: Science category. The only reason this is of interest here is that ExploreLearning creates all its Gizmos (online multimedia content) with Adobe Director. Oh yeah, I also work for EL 😉

3 comments May 17th, 2006

Menus, menus, menus

Are you ever working with Director and you want to use something that is in the menu, but has no keyboard shortcut? I often find myself trying to get to the menu, but when using multiple large monitors for development it sure takes a lot of mouse motion to get over to them.

I stumbled on a lovely little utility (OSX) that lets you pull up the entire list of menu item in Director (or any other program) just by hitting a keyboard combination. It runs in the background and makes life a bit simpler in a few situations.

Homepage for DejaMenu for MacOSX.

5 comments May 11th, 2006

MM now redirects to Adobe

As the merger between Macromedia and Adobe continues the transition advances. If you try to go to macromedia.com you will now be redirected to Adobe.com. For the past months there has been no image of the Shockwave plug-in on the front page of MM (or Adobe), but the logo has returned to the front page on the lower left side. Although not featured in the upper left with Flash and Acrobat Reader, it is at least an image now!

Now, what exactly will this do to all the links various companies have to the Shockave plug-in? In recent weeks the reliability of the download of the players on the site have been a bit flaky. Will the new redirects solve these problems. For my morning project I’ll be checking out of few of the new redirects, and seeing where to point users for the Shockwave download.

4 comments May 1st, 2006

Challenge: Create One Game in 48 Hours

If you’ve got a bit of time this weekend and want to do some quick Director coding there is a challenge that is right up your alley.

Rules:
The 48-Hour Game Programming Competition is a “mostly from scratch”, timed, solo coding challenge where all willing game developers spend their allowed time making the best game they can under a common theme.

IMPORTANT:
The whole point of competing in the LD48 competition is to challenge yourself to write a game, from scratch, by yourself, in 48 hours. That’s what we old-timers call the “spirit” of the competition.

If you’ve got a question regarding any of these rules – see whether thinking about the above statement will answer the question for you.

The details:
Starting: April 28 2006 8:00 PM US Pacific (April 29 2006 3:00 AM UTC)
Ending: April 30 2006 8:00 PM US Pacific (May 1 2006 3:00 AM UTC)

You will have to submit your source code, but for a quick game it could be fun. If the theme is physics I have a feeling I’ll come up with something 🙂

Add comment April 27th, 2006

DirectorWeb 1994-2006

A bit of a sad day in the Director community. The DirectorWeb site has gone in to hibernation and will no longer be updated. It will remain up for historical purposes.

Back in 1994 I was trying to learn Director and stumbled on to the site. It was so long ago I have no clue what search engine I used, but my guess is I found it on Yahoo (back when they had the “new site of the day” with about five sites/day). Without the site I never would have been able to learn as much Lingo as I have. I have a feeling I never would have gotten ExploreLearning started as a company.

A million thanks to Alan Levine for having maintained the site for so many years, and thanks to those that helped the site grow during that time. Twelve years for one web site. Amazing.

4 comments April 19th, 2006

dswmedia = name of my HD

I do almost all my work in the web-based world of Shockwave and use shared casts. If the content is not placed in a path that includes a “dswmedia” folder the shared cast content can’t be loaded (see Technote 15497) when you are trying to preview the media locally.

I’ve worked with lots of dswmedia subfolders on my hard drive over the years, but finally just went ahead and changed the name of my HD to dswmedia. Now everything sits inside my dswmedia folder (such as /dswmedia/Users/raman/Desktop/funstuff/demo.dcr).

I’ve thought about doing this for years, but always like to have HD’s with more entertaining names such as Spock’s Brain. Dswmedia is not as much fun as Spock, but I’m learning to live with it.

This of course was on OSX where all paths start with the volume (named dswmedia in my case). On Windows can you rename your HD dswmedia so you could do the same thing, or will it always have to start with a single letter? I don’t know the answer to that one.

4 comments April 17th, 2006

Fun/Useful 3D with Director

3D is one of those things that can be done with Director and is very hard to do with other tools when you want web-based content with a common plug-in. Here are two examples, one for fun and the other for a real-world application. I have never been to the Quake world, but I did live in Miami for many years. Rumor has it there is a 12 headed hydra in the Quake demo.

In SuperTour you can walk down several beaches and walk in to hotels. The scenery has changed quite a bit since I was there in 1987. Several of the bars in the hotels on SuperTour site look more my style than the Quake rooms, and I don’t think there are any hydra(s?).

QUAKE 3 Forever (demo v0.5)
The new game engine in action (test map):
– advanced SW realtime lighting & lightmaps
– complex geometry & hi-res textures
– decent frame rate on entry-level machines (!)
– file size: 1.25 MB

SuperTour is a travel portal site that uses Shockwave to present users an interactive product demonstration of hotels and travel destinations. With SuperTour, users can navigate virtual walks from the beach to the hotel lobby, and to the rooms, creating a more compelling experience for travelers and enabling hoteliers to showcase their hotel properties in greater detail.

1 comment April 14th, 2006

Lingo ranks 45th

What is the #1 most popular programming language? Which language are you most familiar with?

According to TIOBE Software Lingo sits at #45 in the overall rankings. Is that good or bad? Using the fact that the ratings are based on “the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors,” do you think it is an accurate representation?

Java sits at number 1. Actionscript at 32. I’ve only had one computer class in my entire life and that was Fortran on punch cards (how many actually remember those?). Fortran sits there at 21.

Interesting tidbit. As a non-sequiter connection, the 45th most populous country in 2005 was Venezuela. In 2000 it was Iraq.

Add comment April 5th, 2006