Category: Director

Irv Kalb writes with an update to a vexing problem he’d had with a Flash sprite not playing its sound (so what else is new?)

If you remember, for reasons of supporting Windows 98, I have a Flash Audio Player which is a very small Flash swf to play mp3 sounds. Under undefined strange circumstances, it would not initialize correctly.

I won’t get into the gory details, but Markie (Castle) and I tracked it down late one night. The problem turned out to be that I had the Flash Audio player on stage (it was just a blank 16 by 16 pixel square), in channel 1, and I had a large graphic covering the entire stage in channel 2. The real culprit is that the Flash sprite must be visible for it to allow itself to be initialized correctly!

First, we just moved it to channel 3 so it was on top of the graphic. It worked perfectly – but I had this white square over my graphic. So, Markie suggested that I make it “Direct To Stage” (apparently that had defaulted to off) AND move it off stage. After doing that everything works perfectly. I wound up putting it back into channel 1 but still off screen, but since it’s Direct To Stage, Flash thinks that it is visible and initializes correctly. Bogus, bogus, bogus.

I haven’t double-checked this myself, but Irv writes that he’s shipping version 1 of his product.

Peter Lundholm, one of the programmers for the classic Director-based CD-ROM game “Safecracker”, came through Portland this weekend for the CHIF2005 conference with a bunch of his students from Sweden. I missed him Monday, when the gang went up to Redmond, but managed to hook up this morning by promising him a ride to the airport so that he could get down to San Francisco for FlashForward2005! Here he is, with one of the towers of the Oregon Convention Center in the background and a little of the downtown skyline in the distance.

I’d hoped to have these up last night, and in a less crummy version than a generic Dreamweaver photo album, but here are a few images from my brief foray down to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week.

I only signed up for the Expo, so I’ll leave comments on the sessions to Gary and others who actually spend most of their time on game projects. About 15-20 folks showed up for Wednesday night’s Director game developer soiree Wednesday night, including a couple of folks I was introduced to but didn;t get into my notes (i.e. remember the names of after a couple of drinks). Regrettably, I didn’t get pictures of everyone, specifically Otto and his pal from Sulake (producers of Habbo Hotel).

As I was taking a last lap around the show floor, I ran into an actual game industry legend. Steve Jackson, the Steve Jackson, of Steve Jackson Games, purveyors of GURPS, Illuminati, and a little zip-loc baggie game called OGRE once upon a time. Also, Car Wars, the official journal of which (Autoduel Quarterly) published a note from yours truly as the first letter in its first issue twenty-odd years ago.

In a post to Dir3d-l, the ever-helpful Toxi provides code on one way to handle camera movement in both 2D and 3D:

>>I want to implement flying from a bird’s eyepoint over a 3D landscape
>>as an animation (not user controlled). Basically I need to move the
>>camera within predetermined paths, right? Now, what is the sanest way to
>>impelement this? Has anyone done this?
>
> Your best bet is probably a Catmull-Rom spline: give it a number of control
> points and it makes a nice curved path between them. Here’s the code for
> drawing one into an image object – hopefully the translation into a camera
> movement should be obvious enough

i’d say so too… i’ve written a generic CR class i’ve used for a randomized camera fly-through in a game. the code is based on some java source and supports both bezier & CR type curves in 2d or 3d:

http://toxi.co.uk/zips/splines.ls

1) define the curve vertices
2) set t=0

then every frame do:

3) set camerapos to gSpline.calcCPoint(t)
4) camera.pointat(gSpline.calcCPoint(t+step_speed))
5) set t=t+step_speed

hth! k.

In the thread “OT: java3d” on Dir3d-l, Thomas Williams of biomorphica posted a series of interesting links to 3D examples in Java on 06 Feb 2005.

Some other processing 3d links:
http://www.flight404.com/version6/index.html
http://processing.unlekker.net/bezierhorn/index.html
http://www.toxi.co.uk/p5/base26/
http://www.xs4all.nl/~elout/proce55ing/flower06/

Toxi
http://www.toxi.co.uk/p5/index.htm

Unlekker
http://processing.unlekker.net/

Robert Hodgins
http://www.flight404.com/version7/index.html

Bodytag
http://www.bodytag.org/

Casey Reas
http://sketches.groupc.net/

Jared Tarbell
http://levitated.net/

On DIRECT-L, a 2005.01.26 inquiry about using the command line to automate publishing Director movies prompted a series of responses, including a very informative thread started by Valentin Schmidt of Germany’s DASDECK about the dispatchCommand method of the UIHelper Xtra in Director 2004MX (with props to former Macromedian Kraig Mentor).

Later in the thread, Valentin posted a list of the codes to use with dispatchCommand.

HaHoa Dang of Boat People SOS put out a notice on the Director Games list today looking for a pro bono developer to create a prize wheel similar to the one Pat McClellan did for DOUG’s Multimedia Handyman several years back. Contact him at hydrogen7@yahoo.com if you’re interested.

I haven’t seen any mention of this New York Times article on the lists or blogs, but not only is there a mention of Director, but it contains information that may be of interest to anyone working on networked games. The NYT site will only have the original article (“For an Inventor, IM Opens a WindowTo a World of Games”, October 21, 2004) available to registered users for a few more days, but the full text is on some kid from Iowa’s web page, and I’ve excerpted interesting points here (emphasis added).

For the past year, Jules Urbach has been crunching computer code in a converted bedroom on the second floor of his mother’s house in Sherman Oaks, Calif., fine-tuning a piece of software that may well revolutionize online gaming.

…

Mr. Urbach hopes they will be inspired to irrevocably change the online gaming landscape. His invention, which he calls Otoy, is a game engine that piggybacks on instant messaging, and thus it is something of a Holy Grail in the software world.

…

Mr. Urbach is a video game prodigy. In 1992, shortly after graduating from Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles, he created one of the first CD-ROM games (the best-selling Hell Cab), then became the first developer to design a 3-D video game (Real Pool, www.shockwave.com) using Macromedia Director software, a feat that even Macromedia’s executives had thought was impossible.

In 1998, Mr. Urbach founded Groove Alliance with Chris Kantrowitz and Peter Laufenberg. Groove was one of the first game companies that created 3-D products exclusively for online use, churning out dozens of titles for Nickelodeon, Disney, Shockwave and Electronic Arts, among others, and providing a healthy living for Mr. Urbach, who now pays the mortgage on his mother’s house.

…

”I look at something like Everquest, which is very complex and very addictive, and I see that working for simpler games as well,” Mr. Urbach said. ”That desire to be part of a larger community is just part of human nature.”

To that end, Mr. Urbach has figured out how to use compelling low-memory games, many of them Groove games that occupy less than 70 kilobytes of memory, for Otoy. Users will see a link in their instant-messaging windows that will open a second window, adjacent and slightly larger. This is Mr. Urbach’s versatile Otoy IM portal.

…

Otoy, which Mr. Urbach plans to make available next year for free downloading, can also be used to pull up Web browsers, MP3 files or Excel spreadsheets, depending on the programmer’s intent. Mr. Urbach also has Photoshop built into Otoy.

…

Worth looking up.

The July 15, 2004 edition of the Wall Street Journal (article not available online except to subscribers), contained an article titled “Poppit! Who Knew? Low-Tech Videogames Now Are Hot” with some information of interest to Director and Shockwave (and Flash) developers, although none of those technologies are mentioned specifically. Some selected exerpts:

“The mass market for online gaming, like it or not, is among older women with children playing casual games,” says Matthew Bromberg, general manager of the games division of Time Warner Inc.’s America Online unit. “It certainly runs counter to how the videogame industry thinks of itself.”

With a strong audience, casual games offer a gender-bending case for how the conventional videogame industry can rev up its presence in the U.S. online market. One-third of Yahoo’s game players are women 35 or over. Electronic Arts Inc.’s Pogo.com Web site has 14 million players per month, 55% of them are women.

At AOL, online games are the biggest activity after e-mail and instant messaging, logging 10 million players per month. DFC Intelligence, a San Diego market-research firm, forecasts that there will be over 100 million casual gamers world-wide by the end of the year.

The most popular titles are variations on simple classics—card games like poker and bingo—and represent a new zone for relaxing and socializing. Game traffic is heaviest in the afternoon and evening hours, when there are large numbers of women at home.

For game-makers, the economics of casual games are the most compelling. While cutting-edge videogames can take years and millions of dollars to produce, casual games—which lack the realistic graphics, epic battles, and strategic team play common to big budget console titles—are designed by a few people, often for $100,000 or less. [emphasis added]

The article’s available from the WSJ site for $2.95, although you might be able to dig up a copy of Thursday’s Marketplace section if you get the lead out. Just a little something to add to your list of persuasive documents for potential clients (it’s a lot shorter than the IDGA white papers).

The Netherlands cranks out another impressive piece of work in the form of Aldo Hoeben and fieldOfView’s 3D panorama viewer: SPi-V (pronounced “spiffy”). It combines high-quality static 3D and photographic images with animation.