Somebody has already made some code samples available to the Director user community, using the new Aegia Physics plug-in for 3D work in Director. I was glad to find these, since it was a disappointment to me that Aegia did not make any samples or tutorials available upon Adobe’s release of Director 11. I remember when the Havok Physics Xtra was made available for Director back in the olden days, Havok made a nice collection of tutorials, demos and sample code available to the community. Looks like we’re on our own here for the time being.

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Adobe finally did it, resurrecting Director from the dead. The English version of Director 11 is to become available in March. My questions about a physics engine have also been answered. I had been wondering all this time what would become of physics for Shockwave 3D, since Havok and Macromedia stopped partnering, way back in the days of Director MX 2004. It turns out that Director will now ship with the AGEIA PhysX engine. I’ve signed up to download the AGEIA PhysX SDK so I can begin learning the thing. I hope that at least a lot of what I learned about Havok will be somewhat transferable to AGEIA. Physics is physics, right? Some of it should be similar. I hope.

It’s been a long wait for the next release of Director. Adobe has thrown us Director users very few bones. Finally, last week I  checked Adobe’s web site and found another bone. For so long, there has been no change to the little paragraph of the FAQ that answers the question as to when the next version of Director is expected to be released. The paragraph said forever that the next version was expected to be announced late in 2007. Now it says the announcement of the next release is expected to occur in January 2008.

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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! continue reading »