Category: Director

Macromedia has put out a call for speakers and topics for this year’s MAX conference, November 1-4 in New Orleans.

Time to dust off your cool ideas and swamp the program committees with Director content.

Colin Holgate of Funny Garbage weighs in with what he describes as one of his smallest Shockwave movies ever: a stereoscopic (red/blue anaglyph) image of a star field that you can maneuver through and around. Use the arrow, U, D, Z, and X keys, and wear your 3D glasses. Reload to get a different star field.

So I’m idly flipping through a print issue of MX Developer’s Journal (that I’m not sure why they’re still sending to me), reading through Ron Rockwell‘s article “Are Your Brain Cells Colliding?”, about how Flash and Freehand treat Bézier curves in different ways. There’s a sidebar on the difference between quadratic (Flash’s one control point/segment) Béziers and cubic (Freehand’s two control point/segment) Béziers, and in the second paragraph I see the words “…you can read all about Bézier curves at www.moshplant.com/direct-or/bezier/“. That stuff’s been up now for so long (since 1996) that it’s the top item on a Google search for “Bezier curve”. Gotta update that set of pages one of these days.

In a dirgames discussion about whether the Maxon Cinema 4D, a cross-platform modeling and animation tool, could export animations to the Shockwave 3D format, Mark McCoy of ezupa.com pointed out a brief tutorial by Gary Ingle on how to rig and export bone animations, which have apparently been supported since version 8 was released last spring.

Perennial Dir3D list poster noisecrime mentioned on Tuesday that one of John Hattan’s reports for gamedev.net from the 2004 Game Developers Conference last week had a couple of things to say about Shockwave 3D versus other Web-based 3D tech. This is not a joke.

On Friday, I heard through Roger Jones of Throbbing Media that one of the biggest names from the early days of Director development, Jim Ludtke, had died.

Ludtke was a pioneer in many ways. His work was not only rich and complex, but it was incredibly strange, as well. His association with the band The Residents led to one of the most memorable CD-ROM projects ever, the 1992 3D environment/art gallery/avant-garde rock experience called “Freak Show”. For a couple of years, it was difficult to pick up an issue of “WIRED” or any other multimedia-oriented publication without running into a reference to Jim Ludtke.

He did amazing things with 3D back when that was a far more complex task than it is now. I’m sorry to see him go.

Developer Valentin Schmidt has freeware scripting Xtras for Windows that do things like create PDF files, manipulate MP3s, and more. He announced on DIRECT-L that he’s made some modifications to them for DMX2004 compatibility and they’re available for download.

In a DIRECT-L post Tuesday (titled “FlashMX2004 List + DMX2004 = FREEZE”), John Mathis of Inplicity documents 11 steps to lock up Director on Windows:

1. Open Flash MX2004, create a new flash document.
2. Drag a List component out a List component.
3. Populate the List component manually with 5-6 items.
4. Adjust the size of the List box. Just make it a bit bigger.
5. Export a SWF file.
6. Open Director MX2004…create a new movie.
7. Import the test swf file & place it on the stage.
8. Play the movie. Click line items & observe that it works fine.
9. Stop the movie, and set the sprite to Background Transparent.
10. Play the movie.
11. Click line items and the system becomes unresponsive.

John’s results were on a Windows XP system. I was able to reproduce on Windows 2000 Server in both authoring and in a projector. Bizarrely — considering the Flash playback issues on the Mac in general — OS X seems unaffected.

Anton-Pieter van Grootel wrote to the Director 3D list that he had a demo movie of a morphing terrain mesh. Peter Bochan has graciously posted it on his site for public consumption.

Drag the model to view it from different angles. Choose a new terrain by clicking on one of the images at the bottom.

Andrew Keplinger of Left Brain Games reports an easily-reproducible bug in Director MX 2004 with text fields under Mac OS X.

Basically, if you use the Darkest, Lightest, or Blend inks on a text field sprite, the visual display is garbled and stretched horizontally as in the image above (the lower sprite uses the Normal ink, the upper uses Blend.

Gretchen Macdowell of updatestage verified that this is not an authoring-only issue — it happens in projectors as well. And I, well, I found it in Director MX. No verified sightings under Windows or OS 9.

To find it for yourself, try these steps.

1. Create a text field with at least a few characters in it (that’s text field, not a text cast member).
2. Put the field on the Stage or in the Score.
3. Set the text field sprite ink to Darkest, Lightest, or Blend (Darken and Lighten don’t cause any problem).