« December 2005 | Main | February 2006 »
January 31, 2006
Director as a game tool covered on gamasutra.com
There's a good article on gamasutra.com that highlights the benefits of using Director as a games development tool. It does so via an interview with the man behind the game Dodge That Anvil, Jake Grandchamp from Rabidlab (I'll spare exposing his secret mailing list identity, ssshhh!). It's worth a read not only for those that use Director, but for anyone in the games development field:
Road To The IGF: Jake Grandchamp, Rabidlab (Dodge That Anvil!)
Enjoy!
Posted by thiggins at 08:50 AM
January 30, 2006
Halo UI Prototyping and Director
I have an interesting bit of news I'd like to share that came my way via Mike Chambers. You see, not only do Mike & I have the whole Macromedia-to-Adobe thing in common, but we're both also fans of Halo and Halo 2 in a big way. And late last week Mike sent me a link to the following bungie.net article about how Halo is developed:
Bungie Weekly Update, January 27th: User In Yer Face
While I think the article is a good read in general about UI development, especially for a complex and involved game like Halo, the important bit for me at the moment is the fact that Director was used for UI-prototyping as it allows quick development of complex UIs, thus allowing for shorter design iteration loops before going off into their native engine code to implement to proper in game UI experience.
Anway, give it a read if this sort of thing interests you, enjoy!
Posted by thiggins at 11:20 AM
January 24, 2006
Game Developer's Conference (GDC) 2006
It's likely not really news to most folks but the Game Developer's Conference (GDC) is coming up quite soon and I for one will be there. I've got a Classic pass for the conference which gives me access to a variety of sessions and of course the show floor for Wednesday through Friday. If you're at all interested in games development this is of course a good conference to attend! Beyond the conference itself I'm also planning on attending the Minna Mingle event on Wednesday night, should be a good chance to meet folks from around the industry.
Who else is going to be there?
Posted by thiggins at 01:09 PM
January 19, 2006
Director and QuickTime 7 for Windows
The release of QuickTime 7 for Windows (version 7.0.3 was the initial release version IIRC) towards the end of last year unfortunately brought up some serious issues for Director developers. The problem was that with this new player installed, Director's QuickTime Asset Xtra failed in a number of ways as discussed in the following Tech Note:
QuickTime VR playback fails on Windows when using the QuickTime 7 player
I'm just here to give folks a heads up that I'm sending off a request to update the above Tech Note as a result of finally obtaining some test results after installing the QuickTime 7.0.4 update. The behavior folks were experiencing with the 7.0.3 player were due to a combination of issues, some of which were found in the QuickTime player code and others that are found in our own QuickTime Asset Xtra. The issues brought about by the QuickTime player code changes seem to have been resolved.
When using QuickTime 7.0.3 on Windows (copy/pasted from the above tech note)
* Mouse interactivity may fail. QuickTime VR sprites must use the Direct to Stage playback option in order for standard mouse interactivity to work. The sprite must always be set to Direct to Stage and toggling or setting this property to false at any time will prevent later interactivity, even if the option is set again to Direct to Stage.
* The following QuickTime VR sprite and/or member properties return incorrect or erroneous values, and they fail to accept appropriate value set attempts: fieldOfView, hotSpotEnterCallback, hotSpotExitCallback, isVRMovie, node, nodeEnterCallback, nodeExitCallback, pan, tilt and triggerCallback.
* The following QuickTime VR sprite methods fail silently and without error: enableHotSpot(), getHotSpotRect(), nudge(), ptToHotSpotID() and swing().
The motionQuality and nodeType QuickTime VR sprite properties behave as expected. There are no issues for users on Mac OS X.
When using QuickTime 7.0.4 on Windows
* Mouse interactivity may fail. QuickTime VR sprites may use either Direct to Stage or non-Direct to Stage playback on sprite initialization, but toggling the Direct to Stage playback on or off will result in a loss of mouse interactivity. After toggling the directToStage property the user will not be able to pan or tilt the QTVR scene and there will be no cursor changes while over the QTVR sprite. The user will however still be able to click on hotspots within the scene and have those hotspots navigate between scene nodes.
* The properties and methods of QuickTime VR sprites are fully functional.
The remaining issues pertaining to the toggling of the directToStage property have been fixed in an internal test build of the QuickTime Asset Xtra. We'll soon be looking to make the updated Xtra available to not only the developer community but to the Shockwave user base as well (via inclusion in our installers and by posting Xtra packages for download/install in the Shockwave player).
Sorry, I don't yet have a specific date to offer for when we'll have the new Xtra available, but I can say it will be soon so stay tuned.
Posted by thiggins at 11:02 AM
January 17, 2006
Issues With Shockwave and Firefox 1.5
The release of Firefox 1.5 is causing some issues for Director developers and end-users of the Shockwave Player in that certain system locale settings seem to cause unstable behavior in that float value operations go awry. I personally give credit to Aldo Hoeben for first notifying me of this issue and for clarifying the steps needed to reproduce it, as such folks might give Aldo's blog a read for more details on this issue. Our QA team has reproduced the problem in house and we will soon be posting a tech note on the issue. Of course we've also started a dev investigation into the issue so we can hopefully identify the problem code and see what sort of fix might be needed.
For those truly interested in following this closely, Aldo also went so far as to submit a bug against Firefox directly:
Bugzilla Bug 321704: Firefox 1.5 breaks Shockwave content on non-us systems
Thanks Aldo and everyone that helped you narrow this down.
Posted by thiggins at 04:15 PM
January 16, 2006
Director podcast courtesy of Magicgate Software
I was recently alerted to a Director-focused podcast being put on by the folks at Magicgate Software and I for one hope it gains popularity. Of course I should mention that I became aware of it by way of an invite to participate by being interviewed for a podcast episode which I would happily do. We're arranging the details on that so keep an eye out, but in the meantime it seems they've got things up and running:
Magicgate Software Director Podcast
Note: I have edited the above Podcast URL as of Thursday, January 19th to point to a more appropriate location.
Posted by thiggins at 03:04 PM
Creating a Shockwave 3D Game Level in 30 Minutes
Hey folks, just a quick heads up to alert folks to the fact that a good new article has just been posted to the Director Developer Center that focuses on 3D content development. Mal Duffin of CanDo Interactive wrote up a great article on how you can use their 3D Modeling Training Tool to achieve a playable 3D game level in well under an hour. Give it a read:
Creating a Shockwave 3D Game Level in 30 Minutes
Enjoy!
Posted by thiggins at 02:55 PM
January 04, 2006
Shockwave 10th anniversary? What happened?
So towards the end of last year we announced the fact that early December 2005 was the 10th anniversary of the first Shockwave Player release and to help celebrate that we were hosting a content contest (here is the relevant blog entry). Well, with the closure of Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia many delays and extra hurdles have come up that have us still waiting to post our information. Believe me, many submissions came in and we have the winners selected, but now we're in the queue for some web team attention to complete the task. We still plan on posting things, it's just going to happen about a month later than expected, please stay tuned!
Posted by thiggins at 12:36 PM