Product Reviews

A few years ago, Macromedia Director looked like it was down and out. Its sassy young sibling, Flash, was stealing all the Web work, just as the CD-ROM and presentation business it had excelled at was moving over to the Internet. Then a strange thing happened: Macromedia sensibly rewrote the Shockwave player so it was small and fast, and Director took off as the best way to provide funky games for idle Web users.

While its success may have been helped by Java's failure to provide a fast, stable and comprehensible-by-humans platform to work with, its rapid emergence as a gaming force is a testament to Macromedia's far-sightedness in effectively rebuilding it from scratch as a Web product. In version 8.5, Macromedia provides a long-awaited technology: true 3D capability, ideal for small networked games and animations.

Director has been able to do 3D through Xtras for some time, but these require the awkwardness of an extra download and specific authoring tools. Now it's in the program itself and is quite seriously awesome. You aren't going to get Quake III engine performance out of it - the example movies supplied look like early PlayStation games - but then you don't need to be John Carmack to code this stuff, either.

Director 8.5's 3D features are licensed from Intel's Internet Architecture Labs. Intel's 3D technology scales nicely in two directions. It automatically reduces the detail and complexity of models for lower-bandwidth connections. It also takes account of the speed of the client machine, reducing the number of polygons and textures in a model for less highly specced machines.

Director can also figure out the best rendering engine to use - from a choice of software that isn't fast, OpenGL, which is, and two flavours of DirectX. This can be manually overridden, although you'd be daft to do so. What all this means is you can't go wrong: Shockwave's 3D engine will automatically adjust to the best possible settings.

Getting a 3D model into Director is a matter of building it in a third-party application and exporting it in the new W3D format - there's no real internal editor.

The 3D community has come out in support of the new format, with big names such as Alias|WaveFront, NewTek, SoftImage and Maxon all promising to add W3D to their Export dialog boxes. This is a sensible move by Macromedia, as most 3D artists spend a lot of time mastering their tools. But it does raise the entry price of a multimedia software suite considerably, with most 3D tools costing a lot more than even relatively expensive software, such as Director.

Birth of an animation

Once

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you have a model set up within Director you can manipulate it in three ways, analogous to the methods you use to create simple interactive animations. The first method - opening it within the Shockwave 3D editor - is the simplest but allows you to do little more than set camera positions.

Ambient and specular light are set with the sprite's Property Inspector. The second method is to attach pre-built Behaviours from the supplied library of casts. The behaviours are well thought out and provide an easy dialog box based method of creating interactive 3D animations.

The third method of creating interactive animations, making custom Lingo code, is by far the most powerful and rewarding. Shoe-horning 3D into Director has meant the addition of over 370 new keywords to Lingo, dealing with everything from simple camera rotations to complex transforms of models' meshes. You can even create and manipulate 3D primitives on the fly, including satisfying particle systems.

The 3D Lingo sits well within the overall language: there are a few rough edges but generally it'll be easy for current Lingo coders to get up to speed with the new features. The one disadvantage is that Lingo is getting bewilderingly large - perhaps not as bad as Java's standard classes, but not far off. One feature that could do with looking at is the code development tools: a class browser would be a nice addition, as would a profiler, especially as 3D needs as much speed as it can get.

Get Real

While 3D is an instantly eye-catching addition to the Director/Shockwave suite, it's easy to overlook the other major new feature. Director can now use and manipulate Real Media files and streams. Better yet, you can treat them pretty much as you do QuickTime content, resizing, moving and skewing them at will. What's more, the quality and performance is excellent, without any apparent lowering of frame-rate, even in bizarrely skewed and rotated images.

Flash integration is brought up to date with the addition of Flash 5. This adds some extra support for ActionScript and the option to grab and manipulate Flash's internal XML data, as well as use the printing features of the new Flash.

Supporting Flash 5 is an essential upgrade: most Flash developers have moved to the new format to take advantage of the better working environment and enhanced ActionScript.

Perhaps the nicest surprise in Director 8.5 is the inclusion of a 1000-user, multi-user server. You no longer need to hand over extra cash for a decent Shockwave messaging solution. The possibilities of a bundled multi-user server and interactive 3D sprites are obvious: Macromedia clearly wants to sew up the Web games market before any other serious competitors turn up.

Director 8.5 is an essential upgrade if you're developing games and demos for the Web. Macromedia has sensibly built on the mature aspects of its former centrepiece to provide a 3D-development environment that's powerful and easy to use. Add the useful Real Media features, the essential Flash upgrade and the multi-user capabilities and you have a highly compelling product.

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