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
Every now and then I have to create an installer for a project I did with Director. I mostly work online and my mind usually goes blank when I need to create one. I’m certainly used to seeing them every day as I install new software to try it out.
On the Mac I typically see the lovely “drag this to applications” statement underneath a folder, and on the PC I get led through a standard sequence of steps where I can place shortcuts in lists, icons in docks, and about five other things I never really glance at (can you tell I’m a Mac guy?). Of course, I also see the dreaded click-thru installer on the Mac…life can’t be perfect.
My tools of choice are both free/donation-ware.
On the Mac you need to install the developer tools that are included on the Mac OSX DVD. Once you’ve done that you can go to HardDrive/Developer/Applications/Utilities and you will find the application called PackageMaker. This is rather easy to use (at least for simple installers), but one of the key things to notice is when the first start the program you have to enter your organization. This line MUST start with a ‘com.yadayada’ statement. A typical example might be “com.myCompany.productName”
After that you can drag content to have it included in the package (usually just one folder full of stuff in my case). You can click on the Edit Interface button to setup the readme text that will get displayed and the software license. After everything is done you click on the Build button.
On the PC side of things you can use Inno Setup. The setup wizard will lead you through all the things that can be included with the installer that you will create including the readme file, options for names in the shortcut menu, folder full of content, the executable of the content, etc.
After going through the steps you can save also go through a build step to create the setup.exe file. The program uses a tagged text file to build the final executable, and making minor edits in that text file are relatively easy if there is a small typo in a name or you decide to change the shortcut menu name.
Both products make it rather easy to create the installers.
February 22nd, 2009
As reported on Direct-L, there have been two sightings of Director 11.5 which is now available for pre-ordering.
On Directorforum you can see a link that shows a release date of March 22, 2009, and on Amazon it shows April 4, 2009.
Seems as if Director has nine lives. Or maybe more than eleven and a half
Image from Amazon
February 16th, 2009
There was a discussion on Direct-L last week about books that are good when trying to learn Flash (and in particular AS3). Several nice ones were mentioned.
I picked up ActionScript 3.0 Game Programming University the other day and am starting to work my way through it. I feel that learning a new language by programming simple games is a good idea, since you always have a true goal in mind. Even better, a bit of physics gets thrown in so that aliens can behave in a realistic fashion when moving through varying gravitational fields
The book was written by Gary Rosenzweig, who many might know from years on various Director lists. Be sure to drop by the site that goes along with book called FlashGameU.
February 3rd, 2009
People occasionally have questions when trying to find a ceiling or floor function in the Lingo library so I figured I’d post it here for future googlers.
Lingo didn’t include these two math functions, but you can write your own functions and keep them in your personal library of goodies.
on floor aFloat
return integer(aFloat) - (aFloat < integer(aFloat))
end
on ceil aFloat
return integer(aFloat) + (aFloat > integer(aFloat))
end
If you are working with Javascript these functions are built in:
Math.ceil(aFloat);
Math.floor(aFloat);
February 3rd, 2009
I had this comment come in the other day but figured I’d make it a post since this is a big issue that has been popping up for years at my workplace.
Is there anybody who can tell me how to fix shockwave 11 it says it is installed, however it is not on my program list and when I try to play games that require it, it pops up saying 1 or more shockwave files are missing! Is there anyone out there that actually knows how to fix this! I am beginning to hate windows vista!
thank you
Lori
I can’t say much about Vista, and I could go in to great detail about what could be happening in some cases, but the short answer is this: download the Shockwave uninstaller, run it on your computer, and then download the FULL INSTALLER and not the default “slim” installer.
If that does not work, then it could be due to the content you are viewing. Some people use Xtras in the content, and many of those Xtras have not been updated to work with Shockwave 11.
In any event, running the uninstaller, followed by a full installation solves this sort of problem for the vast number of users that have issues like the one you described. Hope that helps out.
Note: On the Mac version the uninstaller is bundled with the installer, but for Windows you’ll have to download the uninstaller separately.
January 15th, 2009
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