Director 11 - finally announced

For some multimedia Professionals this is fantastic news - at last ! Adobe have finally announced Director 11 is coming.

Upgade from 8.5 MX or MX2004 to 11 is only £259.82 (inc Vat)!!!!!! As I say it must be Christmas - or a similar religious festival which gets you excited...

Better still Ageia Physx built in - new rendering DirectX9 for 2D and 3D - fully online game creation being talked about at GDC apparently. Oh no I'm beginning to sound like Puki...

IPete2.

So, what is Director usually used for? CD Autorun? Presentations?
I ask because my work uses Adobe Flex right now for all our multimedia use, and we're always interested in new technology.

Almost everything from CD/DVD production, serious applications, web based stuff, ...

A web-games related link:

-> http://www.shockwave3d.com/

but before you should upgrade the Plugin via:

-> http://www.adobe.com/de/products/shockwaveplayer/

Director is one of the oldest (circa 1989/1990 I think) and most robust, multimedia application development environments going. Macromedia left it by the wayside after the MX2004 release, but adorned in its new clothes I am hoping this will be the software release of the year for me.

Director is vastly more capable than Flash although across the whole domain of development tools, not just for the web.

It has had object oriented programming capability since about version 6 (we have had 7, 8, 8.5, MX, MX2004 and now 11). The IDE layout is much easier to get on with than Flash, as it uses a theatre analogy, the stage, the cast, the members of the cast, etc.

It has plugins galore (many of which work through all versions 5 onwards...).

Flash is brilliant and very capable, but underpowered when sheer grunt is required, I actually would not have been surprised if they'd stuffed Director in a vault deep underground and left it there , giving us a bit more power in Flash by embedding the zinc libraries and maybe FUSE into the next version to give it some more flounce... but luckily no.

The upgrade price is also a brilliant way of saying "thank you" to all those companies who have stuck with 8.5 (MX and MX2004 were poor upgrades really) and the 3D in 8.5 was totally rubbish. Let's hope this new version will do us proud.

Go Adobe!

IPete2.

Yeah Director used to be one of the most powerful authoring system(still good from today's view).... glad Adobe finally remeber it.

£259.82 - Hmm.

Windows' built-in Movie Maker thing is free.

And a packet of crisps cost 40pence, but how is that relevant? They're completely different things.

Ah, I was thinking of 'Power Director'.

Having used director, I reckon it's a pile of poo, it is however the best pile of poo available for cd-rom authoring.

Flash has a much better interface and coding for it is much easier (although still far from perfect).

One of my many pet hates for director is the lack of multiple undos, the spontaneous crashing and the need to close and restart to get it to actually do what you want.

Hopefully they've greatly improved it in Director 11.

Actually coding in Director in Lingo is much easier than AS3 in Flash. The whole concept in Director is better than in Flash plus you can always access Flash via Director but not the other way around. I don't know which version of Director or Flash you have used but contrary to Flash Director comes with a very good realtime Debugger. Spontaneous crashes happen to very specific tasks which you know when you're using Director since some years and Flash is crashing from time to time too. I don't know what you mean with close & restart as actually if you have a project open you can start and stop as you please.

Director got ugly under the hood because MM treated it like the ugly duck for a couple of years and put it's efforts into Flash instead. That's what they've tried to fix with this release.

The syntax of lingo is easy, I'm referring to coding things more complex than the usual if mouse is clicked, move this here. I'm not saying it's hard, just that it's generally easier to achieve what I want in flash.



Neither concept makes perfect sense, but personally I think (and this is the opinion of many other people, some of whom I work with), flash is more 'right' than director.



I mean close and restart director, not the movie itself.

Some things go very screwy and the only way to resolve it is to close the whole program and start it up again.



Director MX 2004, flash 2,4,5,6,8

You can also code more complex things in director and as a large part of the coding process is debugging, director for sure it the better tool. I found myself using flash more and more in a way like loading in my codefiles via xml. And also don't forget how supersweet arrays in Director are.

Agreed that both concepts aren't perfect but Directors makes more sense to me.

I'm in since Dir6/7 and Flash4/5...can't remember anymore...makes you feel kind of old.

Weren't all the games on http://www.dawnofthedeadmovie.net/ made with Director? That wasn't too bad - for a movie page. I liked the shopping and the generator game.

Wherever you see the shockwave logo there's probably shockwave behind, so yes.

Well guys...

I guess like all things we each have our own perference, but taumel and I agree here - Director is a better interface, a better coding tool, far more capable language overall (not just in web based applications where it comes a close second to Flash imho).

I have been a multimedia professional for many many years and always think very carefully and look very carefully at the requirements of each and every project I take on. I like both, and have created many games and applications in both. It is rare that Flash is chosen over Director for bigger projects which are not web oriented. By that I mean visitor centre and museum pieces, kiosks, games, touch screen applications, CD-ROM's, DVD-ROM's, training applications.

Flash is great for web work, banners, web sites, presentations (replacing Power Point), but Director can do all those things too, albeit with a different (and somewhate larger) shockwave player - which is why traditionally it has had less use over the years of dial-up. I keep both tools at the ready, along with B3d and others, because every professional has to choose the right tool for the job.

@Perturbatio - I am not surprised you don't like MX2004 - I know there has been a lot of controvesy over the way Macromedia left Dircetor MX2004 out in the cold right after its launch, there's a link to the 'latest update' for MX2004 on the Adobe website which hasn't worked since last March (2007) so getting bugs fixed was a nightmare - and there were some, however anyone who had any experience as a Direcor developer kept 8.5 as their main tool and never upgraded. I guess that's partly why the upgrade is from 8.5 onwards - cause that includes a hell of a lot more developers!!!! Lol.

My order is placed. I shall keep you posted.

IPete2.

I'm surprised that here are Director developers at all. :O)

Something to sneak into:

-> http://www.directorforum.de/showthread.php?t=75892

From the XTRA...

*snip*
a. Ageia PhysX v2.7.2
b. Cloth (Stiffness, Thickness, ...)
c. Softbodies
d. Fluids (Stiffness, Viscosity, ...)
e. ForceFields
f. CCD Skeletons
g. RayCast
*snap*

ooooh lovely ta for that sneak preview - that looks great.

IPete2.

Can be downloaded now...

-> https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/tdrc/index.cfm?product=director&loc=en%5Fus (dir11)
-> http://www.3dpi-director.com/ (3dpi)

Smashing thanks,

IPete2

just downloaded it and it looks a bit confusing for me, i'll stick with coding with blitz3d/max for now :-)

ps hey ipete, i've shot of some emails your way recently, did you get em? i've got something cool to show you

cool e-mailing you now.


IPete2.

I used VideoWorks, the forerunner of Director, and some early versions of Director. :) Haven't touched it in years, but made this http://www.ragtag.net/films/movies/slabbers/index.html game with it.

What I liked about Director was that, at least for simple games like Slabbers, you could just focus on creating the content. I think I spent less than two days in my free time coding Slabbers, the animation and backgrounds took about 2 weeks.

Cute animations, not the most addictive gameplay... ;O)

If you're in need of different webplayers, you might want to check out this:

-> http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/alternates/#sp