Category: Director

I’ve been going to Macromedia conferences now for over 11 years, since the first one I attended in the fall of 1994. I spoke at the 1997 conference. I was a member of the press for several others: as a book author on Flash and Director, and as a technical editor for Macromedia User Journal and Director Online. I missed one: the 2002 conference in Orlando which took place just a couple of weeks after I broke the heck out of my ankle. I was gonna go, but the doctor said no. Considering that I ended up with blood clots in my lungs from that break, maybe it was best that happened close to a hospital rather than at 30,000 feet or at Disney World.

In 2001, the New York conference where Shockwave 3D was released gave me a last chance to see the city before terrorism and war were the watchwords for the day. Last year, the conference in New Orleans got me to that city for the first time, before life there changed irrevocably, as well.

If the merger between Macromedia and Adobe goes through this winter, I have to assume that next week’s MAX is going to be the last get-together of its type under the Macromedia label. I’m not particularly attached to the name, but it is something I’ve been intimately associated with as a customer, commentator (and even contractor) for more than a quarter of my life — which includes a rather long prelude to my entry into multimedia. If it’s subsumed into Adobe it won’t necessarily make a big change in what I do, but there’ll be a putting-the-wrong-date-on-the-checks feeling writ large about it until I subconsciously think “Adobe Flash” and “Adobe Director” (at least, I hope I’ll be thinking that!)

So I’m looking forward to seeing anyone who’s going to be there: the Macromedia folks I’ve corresponded with over the years; the people who’ve left Macromedia; the developers I only see at these conferences (hey, it’s the real reason I go at all); and anyone I might not have met before. I’m off to LA for a couple of days before the conference, see everyone in Anaheim!

If you haven’t already seen it, DOUG, INM, and Macromedia are putting together a Director Get-Together for anyone (not just MAX attendees) on Monday, October 17.

A discussion about font embedding in a Director application that can print forms led me to wonder (just for a second!): Is Adobe buying Macromedia to shut down two of the primary perpetrators of font embedding (Flash and Director) just so they can crank the prices on the Adobe font library up to $1,000/weight?

The International Game Developers Association announced something that should knock those of you one the fence about joining one way or the other in their latest email newsletter: the Sex SIG!

The Sex SIG will serve as a source for related industry news and will provide an online discussion forum and mailing list to promote developer interaction. The group is also working on several initiatives to fortify adult content representation, including conference lectures and white papers outlining responsible development practices and how to promote appropriate access to content.

For those of us with one foot (or maybe just a toe) in the gaming world, there’s an interesting Morning Edition story today about John Romero and Daikatana, the game he did after Doom and id software. More evidence, though, of the jittery broadcasting climate: they bleeped the word “bitch” from one of the game’s marketing slogans on the broadcast I heard.

The watchmechange Shockwave 3D tool developed by Brian Robbins at Fuel and deployed for the Gap made it into the Wall Street Journal today.

The article takes a surprisingly prim tone about the piece, which features an animated 3D character doing a bump-and-grind clad in underwear, which would seemingly be no racier than the dancing baby of “Ally Macbeal” or Tom Cruise’s long-ago dance in “Risky Business.” Non-violent, no nudity, putting on clothing (and taking it off). You’d think watchmechange would be about as uncontroversial as it could possibly be. Maybe Brian’s got some secret codes only the WSJ knows about.

Early reviews are mixed. Comments circulating on the Internet show that some people find it a great way to waste time at the office; others are uncomfortable watching it. “My immediate reaction is definitely negative,” says Lauren Schmidt, a 28-year-old account director at a technology public-relations firm in New York City. While it won’t stop her from buying the chain’s clothes, she says, “I have always regarded Gap as more tactful than that.”

I don’t know who did the game for Comedy Central, but they deserve a round of applause for maintaining SW3D visibility. From CC’s “Daily Show Newsletter”:

====== New Daily Show Game ===========

NEWSHUNTER 2: BEAT THE PRESS

You’re a roving fake news reporter on the go — but you’re not the only van on the highway! Choose your correspondent and get the scoop before some other contrived news entity gets there. Play NewsHunter 2: Beat the Press!

In a response on the dirGames-L thread “about sending data to html with webXtra”, Valentin Schmidt mentions that in his estimate, the fastest Lingo method of converting decimal values to hexadecimal is through the use of the rgb color object and its hexString method. The reverse is also useful.

As an example, take the hexadecimal value D7. To identify its decimal equivalent:

h = "D7"
hx = "#" & h & "0000"
put hx
-- "#D70000"
c = rgb (hx)
put c
-- color( 215, 0, 0 )
put c.red
-- 215

215 in decimal notation, of course, equals D7 in hexadecimal.

Going the other direction, if you wanted to convert a number from decimal to hexadecimal:

d = 186
c = rgb (d, 0, 0)
put c.hexString ()
-- "#BA0000"
put c.hexString ().char[2..3]
-- "BA"

So simple!

The long-awaited Mathematics and Physics for Programmers by the ever-helpful Danny Kodicek is now available. Or, at least Danny’s got a copy in hand now, Amazon’s still reporting one to two months…

In a discussion on problems with long lists and the script window on DIRECT-L (“script editor and ve-e-ery long lists”), Cole Tierney posted a link (in the new DOUG Director Wiki) to his Lingo implementation of the php print_r function, which takes a property list and creates a human-readable, indented string:

put print_R ([#test: [#indent: “joe”], #test2: #bill], 1)
— “[ \
    #test: [ \
        #indent: “joe” \
        ], \
    #test2: bill \
    ]”

As a side note, I’d like to mention that I’ve finally finished my first DOUG article for a long time, on reading XML in Director using Flash XML objects created on-the-fly.

Brian Robbins of Fuel Industries (and once upon a time of CleverMedia) has been poking the Director/Shockwave nose under the tent of the professional gaming world for several years now, with appearances at the Game Developers Conference and participation in the International Game Developers Association.

He’s been so busy, in fact, that he didn’t make it to the Director Get-Together at GDC 2005 in March. We waved in passing from about 50 feet apart as he walked with a client down the hallway past where I was working.

And lately, I’ve let my reading pile up enough that I’ve got a big stack of magazines waiting for me to go through and recycle them because I haven’t read them. But I chanced on the back of the IGDA’s 2004 Annual Report yesterday, and a face leaped out at me from the back cover.