New version of Director in 2007
Great news!
Thomas Higgins dropped a short comment today on the Lingo-L Mailing list:
Thome Higgins wrote:
What I can offer is the same information we were sharing at the Casuality game conference last week: next major release of Director in the first part of 2007. I cannot get more specific on dates nor can I provide specifics on features just yet, sorry.
Well that’s farther off than I wanted, but this confirms other reports I’ve heard that Director is getting more attention now that it’s under’s Adobe care than it was when it was at Macromedia (recently, anyway).
Check out my other Macromedia Director posts here (I won’t start calling it Adobe Director until Adobe’s on site does).
(I added the bold markup to his quote).
I'm Hanford Lemoore. My parking skills are unparalleled.
July 7th, 2006 at 4:41 am
Maybe Apollo is the codename for the new director?
July 7th, 2006 at 2:27 pm
Not so Riley, Apollo is a whole separate project apart from the next major release of Director and the Shockwave Player.
I completely understand the sentiment that a release would be preferred sooner as opposed to later, but at least we’re now able to publicly confirm what I’ve known for months now and that’s that Director/Shockwave very definitely has a future here at Adobe.
July 7th, 2006 at 2:38 pm
Tom,
Actually I’m bummed about the timeframe but I think it shows me (and hopefully others) that this release is not just a holdover from the MM days, that this is something new that Adobe is championing. Which, I’ve been convinced of for a while, but it’s good to get more confirmation on …
July 8th, 2006 at 11:31 pm
I think Adobe will enhance the 3D engine of Director to support DirectX 9 ??
This is a great upgrade to Director as people started moving to other 3D development products.
Let’s wait and see!
July 9th, 2006 at 2:50 pm
I’m currious of the new features and heading of Director 2007. I hope it will also prove to become the development environment of flash content. So we can use the incredible debug options that we all now and love to develop flash based content. Also 3D should be at least up to par with programs like Virtools. Maybe implement the Otoy environment (which is loosely based around the Director fundaments) to provide better performance, small memory footprint, and a wide range of customization options (for example writing your own shaders).
Keep us updated with any new info you have.
July 10th, 2006 at 1:55 am
For now, I don’t care what will be new, I’m just overjoyed by the fact that there will be an upgrade!! Thank you Adobe, and pleaaaase don’t make us wait too long on some more details!!
July 10th, 2006 at 10:46 am
Great news indeed. Lets hope it will support the Apple universal structure as well. It should by then, I suppose.
July 10th, 2006 at 11:55 am
All, please note that for now I haven’t mentioned nor can I mention anything about specific features, 3D or otherwise. For now I’m happy we recieved approval to post a commitment to the product at all, next up is something more akin to a “roadmap”. I can’t and won’t allude to any time frames for more information just yet as I don’t want to set expectations we cannot meet so please bear with us.
July 11th, 2006 at 7:36 am
Adobe seems to be more interested in Director than Flash!
July 11th, 2006 at 10:33 am
Not true JohnB and believe me Im the first one to whine about crappy things. News on flash is flash 9 and 10 are coming with actionscript3. There are gonna be all kinds of changes. Just google or yahoo Flash 9 and youll see. Tom its about time they gave you guys some support. My project is heavily dependent on director and flash integration. I was literally ready to jump out a window waiting on the flash 8 upgrade for director.
Just FYI Director is still horribly laggy on Mac with flash animations. PC is perfect. God i hate macs
July 11th, 2006 at 10:44 am
“Adobe seems to be more interested in Director than Flash!”
Is this why there’s an alpha for Flash 9 out after less than a year of Flash 8, and plans for features in Flash 10 are being made?
July 11th, 2006 at 10:53 am
Whew, that’s great news. My features request have a lot to do with Flash/Director interopability. It would be nice to transparently read and write Flash arrays and associative arrays, as well as giving Flash the ability to access Director lists directly.
!!
That’s my thought for today, anyhow. I’m sure I’ll find something new I want tomorrow. Christmas is coming…..
July 12th, 2006 at 3:17 pm
All, let’s not get into an argument about which is more important, Flash or Director. I’m here to admit openly and honestly that Flash has a much higher standing in terms of product priority. That having been said there’s plenty of room for multiple projects and multiple agenda. This is one thing in specific I was happy about when thinking of the acquisition, Macromedia seemed to have a one track mind: FlashFlashFlashFlashFlash. Adobe is a company that for years has managed wildly different businesses/markets: Photoshop, video editing tools, Reader/PDF, fonts, etc. As a company there’s a much greater ability to handle multiple agenda and to offer each of those appropriate levels of support (appropriate does not mean equal).
As such I think that Director and Shockwave do have a brighter future under Adobe than they had under Macromedia, regardless of whether Flash is more/less important in relative terms.
July 18th, 2006 at 11:29 am
To me Flash is easier because of how well the interface works, but I’d like to get better at Director, Is the interface going to be 90%-100% the same, or will it be a bit easier? What’s the rumor of what it’s going to look like?
July 18th, 2006 at 3:27 pm
This is indeed good news. I work with flash a lot for web projects, and for most things it’s more than capable, but I use Director for most of the installations I build. I’ve been looking to Java for future projects but was dreading the loss of productivity and extreamly quick prototyping that usually won me contracts when using director.
July 18th, 2006 at 3:48 pm
I’m more happy than a happy ting on happy day … just the fact that Adobe are considering the possibilities of Shockwave gives me hope! I’m keeping my fingers crossed and can’t wait to hear more from the new mothership!!
July 19th, 2006 at 2:24 pm
FAN-TASTIC! im just glad director has a future! (if this is all true and not some to good to be true dream)
P.S—i hate it when people even start to argue which is better, flash or director becasue people seem to forget that the two software packeges are for DIFFERENT purposes!
I see flash as primaraly an animation tool, i hate that web designers automatically chose to use flash when there is no real use for it in that context.
Director however, can be used for so much, the most exciting perhaps being the 3d applications.
July 20th, 2006 at 10:45 am
Hope there is some update to the 3d component otherwise Director can be resigned to the dustbin! We seriously cannot wait for this to happen any longer. It is the product’s only differentiating feature on the market since the move to DVD media occured. For Adobe not to ackowledge this especially given their interest in 3d pdfs is lamentable.
July 21st, 2006 at 11:29 am
We all expect a better integration between Flash and Director, besides all the other possible improvements!
great expectations here
July 24th, 2006 at 2:20 pm
Hi,
As a Director user and developer for years I am delighted to hear that Director has a future. This really makes sense to maintain the niche Director has carved out for itself.
Most serious web game and CD/DVD developers, including myself, will always use director first as it provides heavyweight results everytime.
I personally feel that Flash although good, is like a plugin to Director. Again, this is a personal opinion.
The only gripe I have with Director is the interface. It can get very cluttered with a lot of action going on in the score and the stage only having 25%. 50%, etc.. increments of zoom, it was very clanky and cluttered, which meant as with several colleagues, I had to to use dual monitors to get some normality on the screens.
so, if i have a simple wishlist for Director, i wish the developers improve the layout and workflow, and also make colorpicking a little less frustrating.
Delighted though that sense has prevailed and Direcotr will live on. Roll on 2007!
July 26th, 2006 at 5:29 pm
Unless it outputs an SWF file, there is no point in making a new Director.
August 8th, 2006 at 9:34 pm
yes,I hope there is some update to the 3d component too.
August 10th, 2006 at 8:10 pm
My boss is preparing to dump Director, and he doesn’t expect Adobe to
make it any more than a glorified Flash wrapper.
It’s the only application we use now that has such a crap undo -- The compiler that they write Director with has more than that.
This one thing makes it harder to train new Director users.
They make a mistake or two, then panic and bail.
Paul
September 14th, 2006 at 11:04 am
Hello, I haven’t posted here b 4. I would just like to say that I will not take sides against or for flash or director, what I will say is I find director to be a highly useful programme that caters for pepople who want to be more serious in the sense that you can distribute your director applications in EXE format, also director has more ability to interface with the windows or mac enviroment. Flash I would say is a highly proffessional tool which can be implemented as much as you want on the web and has the same if not more abilities than director on the web. again there is a discussion on the plugins. flash or shockwave? personally I donwload both, I also at a reasonable level would be happy to disribute director apps on the web if more people had the plugin. I have made a simple game in director its avaliable on my site if anyone wants to check it out its http://www.verbalmarines.com/HQ please sign up. the sites a bit random but then its not open yet. the game is avaliable in the games section. its advertised on the front page. ANYHOW. back to my point. I think there is room for both apps and I hope to see director bettering itsself in the next release as I have had some problems with it but then I have also had problems with most of the other programmes I own at one point or another.
October 3rd, 2006 at 6:26 am
I’m just hoping the new director will have built-in unicode support. Is there any chance of a heads-up on that?
Basically a DVD application that my company is modifying needs unicode support in order to make the DVDs multilingual. We have a convoluted workaround involving embedding flash animations (that do support unicode) but that will take us at least a couple of months to complete.
So if we knew that unicode was going to be supported in the next Director we would put development on hold until then and focus on another aspect of the project.
Please, please, please can we know about that?
October 14th, 2006 at 10:53 am
I just hope that the new Director has better support for developing interative DVD’s. Since CDs are now passe and being replaced by Flash animation movies, Director has to offer a package for interactive DVD-authoring, but one up on apps such as Apple’s DVD Studio Pro and Encore. Also, the new app should allow someone to playback the DVD on any piece of hardware, including the common consumer DVD player, not just a computer-based one. How about a new app that makes DVDs for high definition format, with games and multimedia created in Director included in the medium and doesn’t necessarily require a shockwave plug-in? One can imagine watching the latest Spiderman movie in DVD and then pausing it for few minutes while the end-user plays an interactive 3D game on the side. Anyway, just an idea.
Perhaps Mr. Tom Higgins has some comments?
November 8th, 2006 at 3:33 pm
Even though Director’s 3D engine is quite complex is it still far from good enough to keep-up with today’s standard. Many game developers are abandoning Director for other more up to date development products as a consequence of this. Also Director’s 3D component is one of the main things that separates Director from Flash and compels many developers to choose Director over Flash or many other development products. Therefore do I believe that adobe should be more focused on Director’s 3D engine rather then other components if they want Director to grow.
I really hope that they will come out with a new and more enhanced 3D engine for the next Director version that at least supports DirectX 9.
November 28th, 2006 at 1:35 pm
I’ll be looking forward to 2007. It will mean the difference between a Director purchase or whether to switch to c sharp. It would be a shame as I can program in Lingo quite well. It would make my personal 3d game projects so much easier.
Would also be nice to see either a mobile version of Shockwave or something to output non flash content onto mobile devices. The current third party plugin is a little fiddley.
December 13th, 2006 at 5:55 am
I guess all the problems around enhancing 3D engine in the Director is related to the Macromedia (now Adobe) contract with Intel. The 3D engine was developed by Intel and they somehow shared the profit. Shockwave 3D didn’t become the universal application that Intel had hoped. Intel was the more disillusioned party because Macromedia didn’t open it up as freely as Intel thought they were going to.(refer to http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/hardware/0,39042972,39184134,00.htm).Now the progress is related to the relation between Intel and Adobe. Adobe used Intel technology on Acrobat 3D and I hope they work with each other to improve Shockwave 3D too.
December 14th, 2006 at 4:27 pm
Well, Director’s 3D ability, while limited in how complex a mesh it could handle, wasn’t that bad for all the features it offered in its first generation of functionality.
What it really lacked was a supporting toolset and some resources—if you wanted to use a mesh from 3DStudio or another program, you had to find it yourself on an external website. If you want a decent interface for experimenting with shader options, you have to get the 3DPI extension or something similar.
I remember seeing a simple demo on the Macromedia website where you could make a 3D woman run around a basic environment—walk, run, jump, dance, change her to a chrome outfit. It looked like a basic Poser character and the default animations. After years of occassional trying, I can still not figure out how to get my Poser characters into Director.. and I can’t find any documentation to teach me how.
If basics like this were addressed, I think we’d see some amazing stuff come out of the existing Director engine.
Director is an expensive investment compared to Flash, yet Flash comes with considerably more resources, conversion tools, and general motivation to get into it and start creating. I believe that Director is more powerful than Flash… but there are too few tools/resources and support for Director developers to actually push the product to its limits.
February 11th, 2007 at 9:53 am
yay! I’m excited to hear Adobe is releasing a new Director. I’m sick and tired of Flash. And I don’t even care about actionscript 3.0. I was learning 2.0 and right now do not have the time to start over again..Flash should have just stuck to being animation software. Lingo makes perfect sense and has had a legacy of being around since late 80s. It works. And for those who say the interface is bad, you really should start looking at all the panels and icons they have added to Flash over the years. It is beginning to become a big mess.
February 17th, 2007 at 2:29 pm
question:- does any one know if i will be able to upgrade to the new director from 8.5 or will i have to upgrade before the new version comes out?
May 14th, 2007 at 12:16 pm
Would asking for a Linux version of shockwave be out of line here? I’ve been getting into Linux lately and Director is an acceptable reason for me to still use Windows… but shockwave? Come on, can’t I just view it in Firefox or Konqueror on Linux?
June 28th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
Besides improved 3d I would like to see something equivalent to Flash’s movie clip. Having the ability to nest time lines would make Director much more powerful.
On a side note, I would like to see the ability to author both Director and Flash content inside of After Effects. Imagine the possibilities.
September 17th, 2007 at 12:58 am
So, where is it? The first part of 2007 …
Anyway, I would like easy database access possibilties and an updated 3D engine. I gave up all hope long ago, but if there really is a new upcoming version I will get it and resume all my discontinued projects immediately
September 17th, 2007 at 3:05 am
Well, after further investigation … late 2007. Can’t wait that long, I want it now
November 15th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
OK, mid-November 2007 now. Does anybody have any solid info on a Director Upgrade??
December 6th, 2007 at 5:23 pm
Director was promised in 2007 -- with 30 days notice. Its now December 2007
Promise broken. Adobe’s credibiity shattered.
February 4th, 2008 at 10:53 am
yea adobe has lost my respect for that little stunt…
February 5th, 2008 at 7:38 am
So, it is February 2008….I still see Director MX on Adobe’s site. Any news about a newer version?
March 5th, 2008 at 11:54 am
New version (Director 11) will be released about the 25th March 2008.