Director 11 will have no 3D improvements... - Macromedia Director 3D

[Ziggi]

More info here (beware, link line may be broken):

[url]http://www.anark.com/developer/forum/topic.asp?topic_id=1888&forum_id=12&Topic_Title=No +competition+from+Macromedia+Director&forum_title= Anark+Studio+Discussion&cat_name=Anark&M=-1&S=0[/url]

Interesting but sad !
Ziggi

[shockland.com]

There is nothing to say more.

[mockworld]

Consider the source. The guys is trying to push his Anark technology. He
mentions a "future of Director" meeting that never occured. I think he might be
refering to the "Director Get-Together":
[url]http://director-online.com/announce.php?command=display&id=170[/url].

He also says Adobe has "endorsed other 3D formats now" but doesn't mention
which ones. I think he might be refering to U3D, which is very similar to
Macromedia's W3D format (it even shares much of the same code), but is not a 3D
engine.

Steve

[LovehinaC]

Every now and then you can hear someone foretelling the demise of Director. I
mean sure, Macromedia is concentrating allot more on other products like Flash,
but since there are allot more Flash users, this is perhaps proportional. If
you have more customers ordering a certain product, you will as a result of
that increase production and find ways to improve it. Macromedia cant give all
of its products equal attention, (that would be called communism).

Having said that, I personally think that Director needs more of an interface
and reputation improvement, rather than performance one. Director needs to have
its interface freshened up to a Dreamweaver standard. The whole interface looks
old an instable.(I personally have never liked Macromedia's interface styles,
but I would still like Director to have a more Dreamweaver like interface)
Also, the code editor is in a desperate need of JavaScript color coding and
code hinting wouldn't hurt as well. The reference files really need to be
updated, specially since there are allot of things missing concerning 3D
JavaScript functions and methods.

Another important thing that I think needs to be improved is Directors
reputation. If you think about it, Directors engine is many, many times more
powerful than Flash's. And if you add the 3D engine, you cant even compare the
two. Iv read an article about the MAX 2005, where it said "Andrew Phelphs gives
a presentation on Shockwave 3D that impressed many Flash developers who were
unaware of Director's 3D capability.". This is exactly what I mean, Director
perhaps still has an reputation of being an presentation and cd maker software.
What Macromedia really needs to concentrate on is to improve Directors
reputation. I mean when you think about it, with Director you are capable of
making high performance, commercial 3D accelerated OpenGL/DirectX interfaces
and games, that run simultaneously on both Mac and PC.
I was able to make an high resolution 800x600, 3D accelerated 2D interface
with large images, alpha blended shadows and scaling effects. This interface
ran flawlessly with milky smooth motion (using vSync) on both my current 3 GHz
PC and my old 500 Mhz!!! You could never accomplish this with Flash. In Flash,
even on on my 3 GHz you get y motion, and you can forget about using large
scale sprites that move smoothly across the screen. Since most people today
have a 3D Graphics card, I personally think is stupid, unnecessary and unfair
to have them view y, slow content that instead could flawlessly be handled
by the graphics card, without the use of the CPU...
One step that Macromedia made to improve Director's reputation is to introduce
JavaScript, which is a step in the right direction but there is still more to
be done. There is ex. a huge amount of Flash game developers out there, that
struggle every day with a slow and limited engine, but are unaware of Directors
powerful 3D engine... :(

[Ziggi]

> There is ex. a huge amount of Flash game developers out there, that

> struggle every day with a slow and limited engine, but are unaware of Directors
> powerful 3D engine... :(

Not that powerful... remeber, it's only DirectX-6 level. With Nonoche or
Necromancer level of expertize in cheats and tweaks you may squeeze it
to the limits but it is that frustrating to fight with all it's flaws...

Please notice - I appreciate Director here and there but it's a pretty
old engine, single thread, and it dies slowly...

Ziggi

[Karl Sigiscar]

Hello,

While what you say is true, it might be confusing. That's why I'd like to
add some precisions.

As close as the U3D and W3D formats might be (being both designed by Intel
and being both binary), the realtime 3D engines exploiting them are very
different:

The Shockwave 3D engine dates back to the year 2000 and was crafted
(superbly) by Intel's engineers. This is a version of the IFX realtime 3D
engine packaged by Macromedia's engineers as a Director Xtra with Lingo
wrappers for the engine C++ functions. This is the result of the
collaboration between Macromedia, Intel and Discreet.

The realtime 3D engine in Acrobat Reader 7 for U3D is DeepView by Right
Hemisphere. Adobe licensed it to create 3D PDF doents. Anark is adapting
Anark Studio so it becomes U3D compliant. Anark Studio uses Javascript. So
do 3D PDF doents with a 3D Javascript engine.

I'm not an Anark user nor a shareholder ;-) My post was merely for
information.

Best regards,
Karl Sigiscar.