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.

continue reading »

Today I finally figured out how to create a simple hinge in Shockwave 3D using the Havok Xtra’s linear dashpot. In the past, I was frustrated by Havok’s linear dashpot, because by default it connects two movable rigid bodies’ centers of mass. I wanted to be able to connect them more precisely, such as by their corners. I found that it is simple to accomplish this by assigning pointA and pointB of a linear dashpot to the desired vertice. First I attached two cubes using two linear dashpots. Then I set point A of the first linear dashpot to be positioned at the desired corner on the first cube and point B at the desired corner on the second cube. I did the same with the second linear dashpot. My demo source code is nothing but a toy app, but it’s enough to get the concept. Once you get the concept, you can adapt it for your own project. Be warned that when you increase the size of the boxes, the results become unpredictable. To adapt this to your own code, you may need to experiment with the vertex lists of the faces of your own model. Download source.

Gene Endrody uses Director to make MMORPGs like Sherwood Dungeon at maidmarian.com. Using only three game servers that run the Shockwave Multiuser Server, he’s had close to 2000 simultaneous players per server. Starting out with a lot of 3D experience but no programming experience, he’s done all the development himself. He started living his dream when Director 8.5 came out, putting real-time 3D on the web within reach. Read the part one and part two of Hanford Lemoore’s interview with him to learn more about this inspiring indy game maker.

continue reading »

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 »

Why Shockwave 3D?

In my long and winding quest to do real-time 3D programming on the Web, I’m back where I started — with Shockwave 3D. Much as I love Sandy, I need at least joints and collision detection, and the only existing Flash physics engines are made for 2D. I’ve put considerable thought and effort into extending Flade (now replaced by APE) to 3D; but I’ve concluded that even if I succeeded, it would take some time for the code to mature. When I first started, I set out to learn Java 3D, but I soon abandoned it for Shockwave 3D. Then I abandoned Shockwave 3D for Flash, once Sandy came on the scene. In my naivety, I thought I could hack out a physics engine the same way I’ve always been able to hack out everything else I’ve needed. Once I learned how complicated physics engines and game engines are, I turned to the Torque Game Engine. continue reading »