Category: Director

We’re less than three months from the date for the Las Vegas MAX and the Shockwave & Awe Director event I’ve been planning since last year at Anaheim.

But it’s not gonna happen.

I always considered it a long shot — the number of people in the Director seminars at UCON/MAX has seemed exceedingly small in recent years — but I’d hoped that there might be people who were interested that might have been otherwise occupied during the few Director sessions, or that some people might come to MAX for other things if there was a Director-related event preceding it. That might be the case, still.

But if the number of responses I got to the various inquiries I made was any indication, I misjudged things. The quantity of people willing to express interest — without even being asked to make any kind of commitment — is very, very small. Like less than three dozen small. Without a larger base of interested developers to draw on for attendees, there’s no justification for signing a contract for space in Vegas. I know the place is supposed to be for gambling, but that’s just plain crazy…

So I’m officially calling off plans for Shockwave & Awe 2006. If I can figure a way to make it work out, either in conjunction with another event or as a standalone, I hope to do so. Heck, Authorware still has conferences, Director ought to be able to field something of the sort.

Of course, there’s no reason to wait for me, anybody who can come up with a viable plan could do the same. It’s not like I’ve got some sort of evil control over the Director community.

During one of the recurring “Director is dead” discussions on DIRECT-L, Valentin Schmidt of Dasdeck posted this:

The question comes up over and over on various fora. People are well aware that you can — in Director MX 2004 — directly access variables in a Flash sprite instance at run-time. Strings and numbers are easy. I’ve documented methods for using the Flash XML Object within Director (both in sprites and as free-standing objects) at Director Online and here on the blog. But what about lists?

That question came up again the other day, so I spent a couple minutes whipping together a very simple demonstration of how to pass a Lingo linear list into an ActionScript array. This is about as bare-bones as it gets.

First, I created a SWF with a dynamic text field in it that would display the contents of the array I created in the movie. I named the field “test” and put the name of the field into the text area.

Next, I imported the SWF into Director and placed it in sprite channel 1. In a movie script, I added the following:

on makeArrayFromList
  lst = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
  arr = sprite (1).newObject (“Array”)
  repeat with i = 1 to lst.count
    arr.push (lst[i])
  end repeat
  sprite (1).test = arr.toString ()
end

That’s all there is. A call to makeArrayFromList in the Message window (while the movie’s running) creates the linear list, creates an Array object in the Flash sprite, then pushes the items from the list in order onto the Array. The toString method shows the elements in the test field.

Easy steps from here are adding parameters to the handler that allow you to pass in any linear list and define a target within the Flash movie (if you don’t want to create a _level0 variable. More complex would be handling multi-dimensional lists as well as property lists (which need to be represented by Flash Objects instead of Arrays) and multi-dimensional combinations of linear and property lists.

Chris Griffith of Atomic Archive was in town last weekend for the WebVisions 2006 conference and he survived his stay in our attic guest room/construction zone and the 100+ degree temperatures. So on his last day, we drove across the river to Washington (the 41st state he’s visited) and Mt. St. Helens, where a helpful visitor at Johnston Ridge Observatory — five miles from the middle of the crater — took this picture for us. After that, it was off to Vista House and Multnomah Falls on the old Columbia Gorge Highway, then the 1-hour tour on Willamette Jetboats, after which he just had time to get his bag together and get to the airport.

In other words, it was just like any other Director user group meeting.

Danny Kodicek (author of the fine book Mathematics and Physics for Programmers) noted this morning on the Dir-3d listserv that IBM is sponsoring a Shockwave 3D application right off the home page of the Wimbledon web site.

To see it in action, select a match that has already begun (or ended) that has the little PT lozenge next to the players’ names. The Pointtracker application replays the games in the match, showing the serve and return speeds, the score, and the trajectories of the ball from just about any angle — you can move around while the game is on and go back to manually play portions of the match. An interesting piece of recorded near-real-time data integration.

GarageGames just made the official release announcement for Torque Game Builder, their 2D engine that includes delivery to Win, OS X (and potentially Xbox 360) as well as networking, physics, collision detection, etc.

They have a 30-day trial available.

I notice that they pitch it to people who know “Flash, Visual Basic, or other scripting language” with no specific mention of Director.

So I guess I didn’t take the last Director job ever to be offered in the Portland area, after all…

Successfull candidate will have the following well-developed expert-level skills:
Extensive Scripting using various authorware especially LINGO. Expert working knowledge of Macromedia Director. Expert level scripting in MS SQL, PHP, etc.; Adobe creative suite and other Macromedia development software suites using BOTH Mac and PC Development platforms.

The dates and venue for the 2006 Adobe MAX conference have been formally announced:

When: October 23-26, 2006
Where: The Venetian, Las Vegas, Nevada

As some of you may know, I’ve been working on plans for a small, one-day Director conference (Shockwave and Awe) on the day before MAX begins as a way of plugging the gap left by the diminishing number of Director sessions at MAXs past.

What response I’ve had has been enthusiastic, but there hasn’t been much so far — in part because I haven’t been able to make any kind of formal declaration before the MAX venue was announced (I’ve known the city for a couple of months but just found out about the hotel a week ago).

I’m looking for suggestions from you about what you’d like to hear discussed, what type of format you think a small Director conference should take, what you think a one-day conference tacked onto the beginning of MAX (but non-affiliated with MAX) would be worth, and — most importantly — whether you’d plan on attending either Shockwave and Awe or MAX or both. And if you think that the whole idea sounds stupid, or is doomed to failure, well, I’d like to hear your thoughts on that, as well — I haven’t signed a contract for any meeting spaces yet!

If you’re in the Vegas area and you have some ideas of a good (i.e. one that’s not going to bankrupt us if things go south) meeting venue near the Venetian, all the better.

Send any suggestions to dplant at moshplant.com!

And a big shout-out to Skip Kinkel at the Director Podcast for putting the name of my co-worker on show #18. I just caught up to it yesterday after being buried in stuff for a couple of weeks, and posted it on the company server, which made his day. I promise not to be so lacksadasical in the future.

Nathan Pryor, the other Director developer (the hard-working one) at my office, pointed out that if you do a Google search for MIAW, most of the first entries are about Movies in a Window, but the top link is to the Canadian site for Mental Illness Awareness Week, which seems eerily appropriate.

Raman Pfaff of ExploreLearning mentions that the site for which he produces interactive math and science simulations is up for a 2006 Codie Award, the winners of which are to be announced tonight in San Francisco.

He’s not going to be there, but he encourages attendees to yell “Director rocks!” if they hear ProQuest Information & Learning/ExploreLearning.com mentioned.