Category: Director

The last of the three MAX Director sessions I attended (aka the only MAX Director sessions) was the only one scheduled for repeat sessions.

Mark Jonkman’s been a regular speaker at Macromedia conferences for several years, where he’s usually spoken on Flash/Director interoperability, and MAX 2005 was no exception. He’s also contributed a couple of articles to the Director DevNet site.

Mark mentioned that there was still no public release date on the Flash 8 beta.

Much of the introductory material seemed to be aimed at Flash developers unfamiliar with Director (most of the Director developers I know have at least a passing knowledge of Flash, and some have a lot of experience with the program). Flash files are generally small; Director is more extensible. Flash uses vectors, a scripting language, nested movie clips, XML, a media server, FLV video. Director uses a wide range of media types, has two scripting languages, movies in a window, and Xtras.

Mark then showed some samples of Flash inside Director:

• Flash as interface components in Director,
• Director as a Flash application shell,
• Flash as an integral component of Director.

To use Flash with Director, it’s essential to understand how the two application can communicate. In Marks’s view, simply modifying a Flash movie clip property is not real communication. True communication needs to be bi-directional. He then went through the evolution of communication between Flash sprites and Director applications over the eight years that Director has supported Flash cast members, then mentioned the ability to exchange image data planned for the Flash 8 Xtra.

Mark mentioned that the Lingo setCallback method used to notify Lingo that an event has occurred during ActionScript execution affects the prototype of a Flash object not simply the object instance.

The AS getURL method is the only way to pass messages out of Flash sprites. My notes mention he said Lingo’s getVariable method was not so useful.

Next, talking about the convert method, Mark mentioned it sends bitmaps to and from Flash 8’s BitmapImages object. He demonstrated some tests he’d done with the beta that showed convert was actually faster copying an image from Flash to Director (and vice versa) than simply duplicating the image with copypixels.

The Flash 8 Xtra should also be able to make use of the new abilities to upload files.

And finally, Mark experienced a crash showing his last example, of real-time imaging of a Flash sprite.

A few months back, I wrote a Director Online article about using the Flash Xtra to read XML data into Director. Now, I would never claim that this was the only way to work with XML; a fine Lingo alternative to the native XML Parser Xtra was created by Andy White six years ago and it’s still probably the best-known method for working with XML reliably. It’s even been extended, with the newer version (as well as the original) available through Shocknet.

But since my article was written in haste, I focused on the loading of XML data into Director and glossed over the actual access to the XML data. Since the XML object is not a Director list and because access to the data is through ActionScript properties executed in Lingo, that was probably a mistake on my part. A recent inquiry by Peter Wolf, who’d read the article, has prompted this attempt at explanation.

Here’s the sample XML document I’ll operate on:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
    <testnodes>
        <item id="level0">This is Level 0</item>
        <item id="level1">This is Level 1</item>
        <item id="level2">This is Level 2</item>
        <item id="level3">
            <item id="level3.5">This is Level 3.5</item>
        </item>
        <item id="level4">This is Level 4</item>
        <item id="level5">
            <![CDATA[<a href="/">This is Level 5</a>]]>
        </item>
    </testnodes>

Refer back to my DOUG article to learn how to read in the file. The process creates an instance of a parent script, which can be assigned to an arbitrary variable. In the article, I named the variable doug; here I’ll just refer to it as x.

The XML data in the object is contained in a property named objXML. Typing put x.objXML.toString () in the Message window converts the XML data to a string and writes everything out.

The first node in the XML data is the testnodes container, which is the primary node for the XML document. It has 6 child nodes. You can determine that after reading this data in with the command put x.objXML.firstChild.childNodes.length. The firstChild reference is relative to the XML data, and points to testnodes. The childNodes refers to the children of testnodes.

If you’ve been confused by the whole goofy firstChild and nextSibling terminology in most XML references, don’t be ashamed. The people who came up with that scheme should be rounded up and shot. childNodes[0] is really all you need for firstChild because they mean the same thing. In the example above, you get exactly the same result if you type put x.objXML.childNodes[0].childNodes.length.

The first item in testnodes has both an attribute (within the opening tag for the item) and text between the opening and closing tag.

The item itself can be referred to as put x.objXML.childNodes[0].childNodes[0]. You can verify that by putting it (with the toString method following it) in the Message window and you’ll see both tags as well as the text between them.

Flash recognizes two node types: element and text nodes. The item nodes are element nodes. If you type put x.objXML.childNodes[0].childNodes[0].nodeType, you’ll get a result of 1.0000. Text nodes return 3.0000 (other types of XML nodes are assigned to 2 and other values).

The text between the opening and closing tags is technically another (text) node. The nodeValue property of the first item returns VOID.

The attribute (or attributes) of a node are accessed through a property of the same name, combined with the attribute name. In the items, there is an attribute named id. Typing put x.objXML.childNodes[0].childNodes[0].attributes.id returns "level0".

To get to the text between the tags, you need to go down another level. First, make sure there is another level. Typing put x.objXML.childNodes[0].childNodes[0].childNodes.length returns 1.0000. Then, check to see whether the node is an element or text node. If put x.objXML.childNodes[0].childNodes[0].childNodes[0].nodeType returns 3.0000, you’ve got text.

You can access the text with nodeValue. Typing put x.objXML.childNodes[0].childNodes[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue will get you "This is Level 0".

A simple change, and you can get the fifth item’s text as well: put x.objXML.childNodes[0].childNodes[4].childNodes[0].nodeValue will return "This is Level 4". Note that the last childNodes index value didn’t change, the items are referenced by the second childNodes level, the final one just accesses the text node within the item node.

To make it a little harder, let’s try to determine the correct reference to the id attribute that says level3.2. That’s the third child node of the fourth child node of testnodes. Remembering that all index values in Flash objects begin with 0, if you try put x.objXML.childNodes[0].childNodes[3].childNodes[2].attributes.id, then you got it right. x.objXML.childNodes[0].childNodes[3] is the fourth child of testnodes, childNodes[2]is its third child, etc.

Finally, let’s look at the results of the text data in the node with the id of level5. If you type put x.objXML.childNodes[0].childNodes[5].childNodes[0].toString (), what you get is URL-encoded data for the text within the CDATA brackets: "&lt;a href=&quot;/&quot;&gt;This is Level 5&lt;/a&gt;". On the other hand, if you reference the data through the nodeValue parameter, you get non-encoded text: "<a href="/">This is Level 5</a>". This is useful if you need to pass text with links or tags in it, because otherwise the XML interpreter will attempt to render them into the XML structure.

Of course, this type of access isn’t limited to my own simple XML import implementation. They apply to any Flash XML object being manipulated in Lingo (or ActionScript, for that matter).

Drop me a line at blog at darrelplant.com if this has been helpful or if you have any questions!

Eric Iverson’s set up a public mapping page for Director developers. You can add yourself to the list and see where the rest of our far-flung community works and lives!

After over ten years of more-or-less full-time multimedia freelancing, I started a job today. Not just any job, but a Director job with Reality Engineering of Vancouver, Washington.

I mention this because — like any good Director developer — I got my job from the DOUG Job Board. Within days of seeing the posting on the Macromedia XML News Aggregator in September, I had an interview, and the only reason I didn’t begin work until this week was a project in progress and an impending trip to MAX 2005.

So, if any of you ever had any doubts about the Job Board, take it from one old Director developer who’s willing to say that it worked not only for himself but for the people who posted the job. At least, that’s what I hope they’re thinking!

It was another disappointing Sneak Peeks. There was a time not so many years ago when the Sneaks consisted of something more than looks at already-released features, possible UI tweaks, and stuff you’ve probably already heard is in the works if you’ve paid any attention to newsgroups, mailing lists, or (in recent years) blogs.

So perhaps it was apropos that the “Code Hunter” theme for the 2005 Sneaks took its inspiration from a TV show that jumped the croc about the time the movie The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course came out over three years ago.

The Sneaks got underway with Captivate, and a statement that it would remove “the complexity of creating branded experiences.” Major new ability: export to Flash 8. Not too surprising, since it already exports SWFs.

Flex was up next. Macromedia’s partnership with Mercury was announced during one of the General sessions. Flex’s big “sneak” was a feature that enable Mercury’s automated testing tools to be used with Flex applications. In other words, a feature enhancement without which the already-announced partnership would be useless. Be still my beating heart.

One cool item — although not technically a sneak or even from Macromedia — came from James Kellik (sp?) of ESRI, a leading geographic information services company. Kellik showed a “next-generation mapping web service” that generates vector-based maps in SWF format, with features like auto-rotating labels and the ability to upload addresses in Excel-formatted files for mapping.

As I watched the Breeze sneak of a “collaborative journey from Australia to Anaheim,” in which the cursors of both collaborators appeared on map screens with identifiable tags, I wondered how long it would have taken to have written much the same thing with the Shockwave Multiuser Server.

The Flexbuilder application’s going to get a built-in RDS database browser similar to Dreamweaver’s. Also, a hot key that shows container heirarchy, and object browser editor window goodies.

Dreamweaver? JavaScript and XML interaction.

I didn’t write anything down for Contribute apart from the application name. Sue me.

I don’t have anything of significance to add to Tom Higgins’s Director Sneak, which was covered in a much more timely fashion by Gary Rosenzweig and on Macromedia DevNet. I do, however, have have a couple of photos.

Gary Rosenzweig, Chris Griffith, Mark Jonkman, and Mike Weiland in the Director ghetto of the Ballroom.

Tom Higgins demonstrating a preliminary version of the Flash 8 Xtra and its ability to move image data between Flash and Director with a version of Andrew Phelps’s fire demo that uses Flash’s image blurring on the flame bitmaps.

The obligatory Director-will-quit-execution now.

After Tom was off, the Flash team came up to describe the “most ambitous” remaking of ActionScript (again, something that was announced elsewhere). A “torture test” featuring 150 “boids” in a simulation showed a marked increase in speed — from about 4 to 15 fps — under the current version of the 8.5 Player, but I couldn’t help wondering how the same simulation done in Director would run. Nonetheless, I wish that some similar effort had been put into Director before so many of its engineering resources had gone away. With ActionScript 3, the Flash team has grafted an optimized language engine onto their Player as a foundation for the future and maintained backward-compatibility with the past.

Finally, some planned improvements in the mobile emulation engine were shown.

And that’s all I have to say about the Sneak Peeks.

Kevin Baird from digital OutPost did a lot of visual documentation of the group of Director developers who floated throughout the conference like a blood clot in the artery of Flash, Flex, and mobile platelets. He has a Flickr image gallery up that includes a number of shots from the special Tuesday night event at Disney’s California Adventure, as well as a video he shot from the “California Screamin'” rollercoaster which just reopened the week before the conference after an accident in July. And yes, he got stuck next to your truly for three of our trips on the ‘coaster (that’s me you can hear yelling “Is that all you’ve got, Mickey?” as we go through the loop-de-loop).

During the late afternoon, Andy Phelps — tenured professor at Rochester Institute of Technology — and Tom Higgins — Macromedia’s product manager for Director — retired to the sports bar in the Anaheim Hilton, where the night before White Sox fans had been spraying champagne around to celebrate the win over the Angels in some sort of championship.

No, Tom did not tell us any secrets, despite our attempts to ply him with liquor. Technically, we didn’t have dinner, just nachos. I did, however, introduce Tom to a drink he seemed to like — which I, in turn, found out about from my brother’s friend Todd Gentry — the Brave Bull:

Brave Bull

1 shot tequila
1 shot Kahlua®
put ice into tumbler, pour shots into tumbler over ice.

I hereby declare this drink the official cocktail of Director developers.

I’ve always admired Steve Zehngut’s business sense (and Gary Rosenzweig’s, for that matter) because they figured out how to make a living developing games, which is something I’ve never managed to do. So, of course, I went to Steve’s session on game development.

Steve’s program started off with a little glitch, as he tried to show the remixed trailer for The Shining as an example of a viral marketing tool. The vagaries of wireless connections at a conference….

Steve went through some of his history and that of Zeek Interactive (curiously, I used to work at a company called Zeeks.com). He talked about the major players in the online and shareware game distribution development industry, including Pop Cap, Skunk Studios, Mumbojumbo, Reflexive, and Freeverse. Estimates are that a company like Pop Cap spends well over $75,000 developing a showcase game.

A number of questions and comments centered around one of Steve’s statistics, that a prime purchasing market for shareware games is women 35+ in age. Speculation ensued over whether they were buying the games for themselves or whether they were buying them for their kids, whether you were writing games specifically for that audience, etc. Points were made that the most successful games in the category didn’t require you to spend a lot of time reading rules, that they had lots of unexpected goodies that popped up during the course of gameplay, and that they could be walked away from to attend to something else (a la solitaire) without affecting game play. Steve recommended Chuzzle and Zume from Pop Cap, both of which I downloaded before heading to the hotel where I’d have had to pay for wi-fi. There was a brief but firm lecture that Director was still a better environment for shareware games than Flash.

Steve encouraged everyone to go to Shockwave.com to play his years-old title Taco Joe, because he’s still getting checks through their advertising-supported model. At other venues, he said that a top game at a place like RealArcade might bring in $100,000 to $250,000 per month at its peak, of which the developer gets 25%. All hail capitalism!

Ze

Frank, the author of “How to Dance Properly” opened with a

riff on how a party invitation made him Inter-famous. He’s

funny, and moving quickly, so I’m just going to type notes

from here on out.

“Shut it down? People were finally paying attention to

me!”

“The Scribbler”: a drawing toy that

rewards crappy drawing. Mentioned Director!

“Atheist” and
“Buddhist” and
“Christian” games.

“Punctuation Substitution”

Stephen Elop, CEO had to follow. said that there were over

3,000 people in the Ballroom. Mentioned those in the

community who have maintained support for New Orleans, site

of last year’s conference.

Showed comments from people on Studio 8 and Cold Fusion

7.

Flash Player 8 gone from 0 to 100 million downloads in less

than a month, still around 5 million per day.

Mentioned partnerships with SAP, foreign mobile phone

vendors, Flashcast in Japan. 1,600 Breeze customers.

Snarked at Microsoft and their efforts to move into the

multimedia development market by displaying a blue screen of

death.

Got around to the Adobe merger about 35 minutes into

presentation and asked people to maintain trust and keep the

faith.

Kevin Lynch, Chef Software Architect, came on to talk about

the future of the web and plugged a Kevin Morale (sp?) essay

called “What is Web 2.0?” It encourages separation of UI and

data.

NOW: Studio 8, Flash Player 8, Flash Lite 1.1, Flex 1.5.

Feedback on Studio 8 has been good. 1.5 million trial

downloads of the studio so far. Kodak EasyShare camera has a

Flash Lite-based touchscreen interface.

Flex adopted by 400 customers so far. Guido Schroeder of SAP

brought onstage for some demonstrations.

Back to Kevin, he says that Player 8.5 has an entirely new

Virtual Machine, ActionScript 3 (with runtime error

checking, standard event model, inline XML, regular

expressions).

Flex Builder designed for developers to create rich internet

applications without a the Flex server. Sho Kuwamoto, one of

the leads on the Flex Builder team comes on stage to build

an app that queries Flikr for some photos and displays the

results. (An error crops up as he builds it. Dead air.

Second time it compiled but he doesn’t notice the app’s

loaded in the browser behind Flax Builder until someone from

the audience mentions it.) 9 minutes from start to finish,

even with the delay.

William Wechtenhiser of the Flex Enterprise team came to do

his own demo, extending the photo search to include chat.

Lynch announces partnership with Mercury Interactive for automated testing with Flex applications. Canned video from Chris Lockhead.

Battery getting low! Gotta go. Only a few minutes left.

[UPDATE]: The future got its licks in via an application mock-up presented by Macromedian Mike Sundermeyer, who was with a group I believe was called “Experience Potential.” His media center app was meant to simulate the nexus of an interconnected electronic homeverse, where all of your videos, games, and music are tied together, with reviews, recommendations, and purchasing capabilities in one groovy application (although I did notice that Spice World was in his collection, so I’d have to wonder just how groovy it really was). I didn’t see any books, though.

At the end, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen came on and talked about how he really couldn’t tell us anything since the last few hurdles of the merger haven’t been cleared yet. He definitely implied that there would be some sort of event next year — we’ll see if that’s just wishful thinking on the part of those of us who are used to shelling out our hard-earned coin to meet our ever-shrinking pool of peers. Some quotes I wrote down for no particular reason:

• The merger should be final “sometime in the next few weeks
• Regarding the Universal Player discussed earlier in the session — from which Acrobat was noticably absent — “use your imagination.”
• The combination of Adobe and Macromedia will “revolutionize how people engage with life.”

Alan Levine, the long-time force behind the Director Web site, mentioned the other day that my 1996 book Shockwave! breathe new life into your web pages is still useful to him. He’s using it to prop up one side of the Apple XServe unit on which he runs the CogDogBlog site. He says another Shockwave book holds up the other side of the unit, but that it’s too much trouble to look to see what it is. At least I’m not the other author!

[UPDATE 13 October 2005 21:12] I was rushing out the door to a meeting before I posted this, and I should have mentioned the contributions of several people to the book:
Dave Yang, who provided a short game discussed in the book and has gone on to great things with Flash;
Eric Coker, who was but a wee lad when he put together the CD-ROM for the publisher (and who has an
eye for captions of sf/fantasy convention photos; and most of all
David Duddleston of Violet Arcana, who provided material for an entire chapter on audio.