Category: Director

It hasn’t been posted on Macromedia’s site yet, but the word is out in the user group community that the next MAX conference is slated for Las Vegas, October 22-26.

Now, I go to MAX because without free t-shirts I have nothing to wear for the rest of the year, but there is, admittedly, not a lot of content at MAX for Director developers. After last year’s show I found myself wondering if perhaps it might not be worthwhile to try to schedule a day-long Director only presentation either one day before or after the main portion of MAX. Director users who were already going to MAX for other reasons would have more content they could use. People who were on the verge of attending might have a reason to take the plunge. People who could get a cheap flight to Vegas could attend just the Director stuff.

The hotel I stayed at for last year’s MAX was just around the corner from the Anaheim Conference Center where MAX was held, had meeting rooms that could hold a couple hundred people (which weren’t being used) and would have been a fine, low-key, relatively low-cost venue for such an event. Whatever happens, I don’t want to get caught in the trap Pat McClellan and Zac Belado did with the planned 2000 Director conference in Florida when Macromedia pulled out at the last hour.

Tentatively, I’m calling this “Shockwave & Awe”. I know there’s got to be a better name.

I’d love to hear what people think of the idea (and suggestions for a better name). If you think that you might be interested, send me your name at dplant at moshplant.com. If you have an idea of how much you think something like this might be worth to you, let me know. If you’d be interested in presenting something, let me know — I can promise you I won’t pay any less than Macromedia’s paid for its speakers in the past (i.e. nothing). If you (Zac) think this is the most screwed-up idea you’ve ever heard of let me know. No promises, but hey, what have I got to lose but a wad of money?

I missed this back when it was originally published (on my birthday, no less!) but this month’s issue of Game Developer magazine reprints several interviews with some of the giants of the computer game development industry from Gamasutra.com, in preparation for this month’s Game Developers Conference.

One of those interviews is with David Crane, who worked for Atari before co-founding Activision in 1979. At Activision, he worked on Pitfall! and other legendary titles.

Since the mid-1990s, he’s been involved with Skyworks Technologies, which develops advergaming and casual game applications. This is from the interview (emphasis added):

“Garry and I have designed and marketed games for every video game system since the 1970s, and we decided to treat the internet as a new game system. Our expertise making quality games for the early (small ROM) game systems would be invaluable in keeping game files small enough for modem download. We settled on Shockwave as a game design platform, a tool we had been using almost since its creation.

As usual, Peter always passes on the coolest visual effects samples he finds, including these pieces by Andreas Gysin of Switzerland, which include several Shockwave 3D pieces (check out .sky and .f/a-18).

Ten years ago today, 31 December 1995, I was working in my office on a Sunday night, printing up invoices and closing out accounts for the end of the first year I’d gone out into the world as a full-time freelancer. I’d been working sporadically with Macromedia Director over the previous couple of years — although my freelance work consisted more of digital image editing and basic Web development. I’d tried to get some business as a digital portfolio programmer with an ad in Step-by-Step Graphics magazine (it was a largely pre-CD-ROM era, and shoehorning material onto diskettes still took some doing) without much success. I’d tried for a couple of jobs in the Portland interactive industry and worked with the International Interactive Communications Society’s Portland chapter as a newsletter editor and officer. At the end of the summer, just as I went out on my own, I lucked into a part-time job teaching Director for Portland State University’s School of Extended Studies.

In March 1995, I’d set up my own web server in my office on a Mac Quadra 630 with a 200MB external hard drive, over a dedicated phone line and a 14.4k modem. At the time, it was the least expensive way I could find to have my own domain name and control over the server, which gave me the latitude to run hideously expensive database add-ons to the shareware MacHTTP software. Still I had my own domain and the ability to create simple web applications at a time when a lot of the businesses I was dealing with didn’t.

I’d been following the development of Shockwave ever since I’d heard about it at the 1995 UCON. I’d almost skipped the show, since I was technically unemployed, but I scraped the money together and made it down to San Francisco where I joined a standing-room-only crowd at one of the public demonstrations. Rather than set up a listserv, Macromedia created a form page which was essentially like a blog comment form, where each new message is posted to the end of the page, followed by the form itself. By the end of the year, it had grown to a couple of hundred kbytes — not an inconsiderable amount given that most everyone was surfing at 28.8k or worse. I’d been checking it for news and info regularly.

Then, on New Year’s Eve, while everyone else was presumably doing something entertaining with their time, I saw a post from a literary agent, looking for a writer to take on a book on Shockwave. I’d never written anything nearly as long as a book — I’ve joked for years that my undergraduate thesis was the shortest on record in my alma mater’s English department, but it’s probably true; I’d never worked on a major project in Director; at the time, the Mac version of the Shockwave Player hadn’t been released yet, and I had to go 20 miles just to see any Shockwave pieces I created with the beta version of the Afterburner, because most of the people I knew from the print business used Macs and they were the only people with Internet connections, to boot. Still, I answered the ad.

In just over two weeks I had a contract with the long-defunct Ventana press. I finished the book (Shockwave: Breathe New Life into Your Web Pages) in ten weeks, missing out on a bonus that equalled a third of the money I got because I didn’t make it in eight. A little over 300 pages of my own material (the folks at Ventana rounded up some samples for another 20 pages), plus sample files, tutorials, and screenshots. And, of course, I had to learn Shockwave while I was doing it. Nevertheless, it was my entree into Director notoriety.

It was the only book I wrote that I ever made a profit on (and no, I had nothing to do with the cover designs).

I was sick yesterday, but nobody else seems to have blogged this. 5 December 1995 was the release date for the public beta of the Shockwave Player for Director on Windows. At the time, Shockwave was a sort of generic term for a variety of Macromedia online initiatives, including Authorware, Freehand, and xRes (which involved a player and a server-side application that intelligently delivered portions of high-resolution images stored in xRes’s pyramidal file scheme). Director files were run through a separate tool called Afterburner. Playback on Macs was still a few months off. Flash (as a MM product) was more than a year in the future. We owned online multimedia then.

Valentin Schmidt of Das Deck has been very, very good this year and will not be receiving a lump of coal in his stocking. He made
this announcement on the Lingo-L list today:

inspired by this thread about getNetText and Proxies a couple of days ago, I’ve now written a little parent script (“HTTP Class”) for using MultiUser xtra for all kind of HTTP requests. It’s far from beeing perfect, but maybe a good starting-point for further customizing.

It has the following features/advantages over standard net lingo:

– supports all HTTP/1.1 methods: GET, POST, HEAD, TRACE, OPTIONS, PUT
(e.g. HEAD can be useful to check if a server is running, or to find out the size of some file without actually downloading it; TRACE can be used to find out which Proxy-Server(s) exactly is/are used; …)
– accessing password protected resources (Basic Authentication, like common Apache .htaccess/.htpasswd protection)
– using Proxy-Servers (without or with Basic Authentication)
– sending arbitrary HTTP-Headers
– supports file uploads with POST (data is automatically base64-encoded, script on the server has to decode it again) and PUT method

– Cookie-Support (send and receive session-cookies; support of persistent cookies could easily be added)

– Session-Support (by automatic resending of session-cookie)
– resuming of interrupted downloads (simply by adding “Range: bytes=-” and “If-Range: ” HTTP headers
– Browser-Spoofing

Included in the zip/sit is also a little tool called “HTTP Sniffer” that’s based on HTTP class. I allows to quickly send arbitrary HTTP requests to any URL, and analyze the response (a bit like the “Live HTTP headers” Firefox extension, but more powerfull). Maybe it can be useful to examine http-network problems or debug server scripts…

It’s at

http://dasdeck.de/staff/valentin/lingo/http_class/

Feedbacks and ideas for improvements welcome.

In a DIRECT-L thread (“OT: Christmas testers needed” on 27 November), long-time Director developer Eric Iverson mentioned that he was working on a JavaScript Santa chatbot.

Steve Taylor gave it a try, summing up the hopes of many of us in one funny exchange:

Sample Transcript:

* I’d like Macromedia to pay some attention to Director.
> Lots of children would like Macromedia to pay some attention to Director.

Maybe he should have asked about Adobe.

Curious about your own knowledge of Director’s ins and outs? BrainBench Employment Testing is looking for beta testers for their Director MX2004 online exam.

Be warned: you do have to go through a two-stage registration process. You get something like an hour for each question (at least in the beta) and you’re encouraged to offer comments on the quiz. There are 20 questions.

According to the folks at BrainBench, high scorers (max is 5) are sometimes contacted to be “cleaners” who help get the test finalized (and get paid $400).

I took about 20 minutes to whip through and got a 4.4, but I had to sort of rush through the last few questions because I was late for a meeting. I’m humbled because I’ve heard others managed to get 5s, but I’ll have to console myself with old memories of my win at “Who Wants to Win Gary Rosenzweig’s Stuff?” at the 1999 UCON (I’ve been told that you can retake the beta test to increase your score, if you wish).

The good folks at Integration New Media have
some photos from the INM/Director Online get-together in the lobby of the Anaheim Marriot (and elsewhere at MAX). One note: do not order the official Director cocktail — the Brave Bull — in this lobby! Tom Higgins and I made that mistake and it cost us $21 each!

The pricing strategy of the Flash Media Server 2.0 (formerly Flash Communication Server 1.5) brought out some comments that elicited sympathy and bitter recognition from me, including
this one from Stefan Richter at FlashComGuru:

The good news is that there still is a free Developer Edition which allows for a maximum of 10 connections, regardless of bandwidth consumption.

There will be no Personal Edition anymore and this may disappoint some users. However the Professional Edition (still priced at US $4500) is now unlimited in bandwidth. This is great news for high bandwidth applications such as streaming high quality video.

But – and it’s a big but – the Professional Edition is also limited in the amount of connections it can accept simultaneously. The limit is set at 100 connections.

While this is a positive change for streaming video applications (the Flash Media Server Pro Edition can push more video than the FCS Pro Edition could if you base it on an average size stream) it is a severe blow for anyone running Flash Media Server as a game server, utilizing shared objects and generally low bandwidth games – this includes myself. 100 connections will basically mean that I can no longer use Flash Media Server for serving games. It will simply become unaffordable if I want to serve 300 to 400 users at once – it would mean stacking 3 to 4 Pro Licenses totalling US $18,000… For these kind of deployments I am better served (no pun intended) sticking to FCS 1.5 for the foreseeable future.

Flash — unlike Director’s now unsupported Multiuser Xtra — doesn’t have the option of creating direct connections to other IP addresses. Messages between computers have to go through a server of some sort, and FCS/FMS is the only option Macromedia offers to do that (there are a couple of third-party tools).

Of course, since the demise of the Shockwave Multiuser Server in 2001, the Flash Communication Server has been the option Director developers have been sold as a replacement — despite its not really doing the same types of things that the SMUS did — you’d think that someone at Macromedia would have tried to avoid a similar trajectory with a Flash product. (And don’t get me started about Generator!)