Playing with Director again is like coming home. Director was the first system I learned to program in. Lingo was my first scripting language. I love Lingo! In spite of being verbose, it’s also concise. Sounds contradictory, but it’s true! I won’t use JavaScript in Director, even though I know JavaScript, and Director supports it. I prefer Lingo. You can do so much with so few lines of code. Here’s what I have to say about Lingo, after having used JavaScript, ActionScript, Visual Basic.NET, and Java: Lingo is the easiest of all!

Now that I’m back in the Director’s seat again, I’ve found even more online resources than I ever could before. Sample source code downloads abound. It’s as if my sudden re-opening of my mind to Shockwave 3D has made it easy for me to find an abundance of what I need. I used to scour the web for resources without finding this much. Yet, many of the resources I’ve effortlessly found lately have been around for some time. Particularly helpful to me is the Havok Developers Site Archive, which contains a wealth of demos and sample code downloads for the Havok Physics Xtra for Shockwave 3D. I don’t recall seeing this many when I played with Havok in the past. After having looked into other physics options, let me tell you, the Havok samples and documentation are very well done. It makes me sad that the business relationship between Macromedia and Havok went sour, back when Macromedia was still Macromedia. In spite of the lack of further development of the Havok Xtra since Director 8.5, Havok is still the best thing going, in terms of implementing physics for real-time 3D on the web. That is, unless you’re already an expert game programmer who’s proficient in Java. In that case, you may be able to do even better with Java. For everyone else, Havok is still the best we’ve got.

Another collection of resources I’ve learned a lot from, just by examining the lingo scripts, is the Tips section on the OS NonLinear Website, which belongs to the ingenious Lingo scripter, James Newton. I had never seen an example code snippet of working directly with vertices in Shockwave 3D, before seeing the source code for his MissVertex demo. His SnapToCap demo source code showed me an example of getting and working with points for the first time. It’s worth looking through his source code, even if you don’t need that specific piece of functionality, because you may see how to do something else. He’s got all kinds of custom behaviors in his movies.

If you don’t know your way around in Director yet, you’ll want to start with the basics before diving right into code samples. The best online Director tutorials I’ve ever found are Dean’s Director Tutorials and Resources. These are the tutorials I cut my baby teeth on. They are a lot of fun.