Director was the primary editor on the Adobe Shockwave platform, which dominated the interactive multimedia product space during the 1990s.[1] Various graphic adventure games were developed with Director during the 1990s, including Living Books, The Journeyman Project, Total Distortion, Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou, Mia's Language Adventure, Mia's Science Adventure, and the Didi & Ditto series. Hundreds of free online video games were developed using Lingo, and published on websites such as Miniclip and Shockwave.com.
Director published DCR files that were played using the Adobe Shockwave Player, in addition to compiling native executables for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Director allowed users to build applications on a movie metaphor, with the user as the "director" of the movie. Originally designed for creating animation sequences, the addition of a scripting language called Lingo made it a popular choice for creating CD-ROMs, standalone kiosks and internet video games content during the 1990s.
Director applications are authored on a timeline, similar to Adobe Flash. Director supports graphical primitives and playback controls such as video players, 3D content players, and Flash players. Director includes a scripting language called Lingo, and plug-in applications called Xtras, which are similar in functionality and design to ActiveX. Director supports a graphical user interface framework with basic controls and allows interaction with external files and certain Windows APIs. Director has been used to create applications, 2D and 3D video games, self-running kiosks, and CDs and DVD launchers. Director supports many different images, audio, and video formats.
Director includes a scripting language called Lingo, and a suite of 2D image manipulation tools referred to as "imaging Lingo". This subset of Lingo allows authors to perform advanced operations such as to bitblit. While a vast majority of users rely on the score timeline for the development of their work, a number of expert developers create stunning projects, such as games, that take advantage of the speed of imaging Lingo. These advanced projects typically use only 1 frame on the score timeline using Lingo to control animation and interaction. Director 8.5 added the ability to import, manipulate, and display 3D objects. The 3D features were quite advanced for the time, unusual for an authoring environment. The 3D capability includes the ability to create geometry on the fly from code, hardware accelerated model display, and advanced lighting features. It also supports vector graphics and 3D interactivity through a Shockwave 3D file object. Since Version 6, Director has supported the import of Flash animation files and Lingo can be used to interact with Flash's Actionscript code for more control.
One of the most powerful aspects of Director is its extensibility, which is achieved through plug-in applications named Xtras. For example, there are Xtras for OS desktop manipulations (creating folders, files, icons, shortcuts, registry editing) and Shell control, dedicated text processing (RegX), PDF readers, and many more. With Xtras, Director can be extended to support additional media types beyond those that the stock version of the software allows. These can be created by users or purchased from third-party vendors. They are created using Adobe Director's XDK (Xtra Development Kit), a C++ SDK. With the change in new versions of Director, Xtra developers need to modify their products to maintain ongoing support. With changing industry trends, many third-party Xtra developers have discontinued products and dropped support due to the cost of development without a significant return.
For online distribution, the Director can publish projects for embedding in websites using the Shockwave plugin. Shockwave files have a .dcr file extension. Other publishing options include a stand-alone executable file called projectors, supported on Macintosh and Windows operating systems, and with Director 12, output for iOS. Early versions also supported execution of the 3DO console. The Director score timeline can also be exported as a non-interactive video format, such as a QuickTime or sequence of images.
From 1995 to 1997, a competing multimedia authoring program called mTropolis (from mFactory). In 1997, mTropolis was purchased and buried by Quark, Inc., who had its own plans into multimedia authoring with Quark Immedia.
The first Director release under the Adobe brand (v. 11), released after a gap of four years, featured DirectX 9 and Unicode support and extended 3D capabilities based on the NVIDIA PhysX engine, as well as bitmap filters, enhanced video, audio and image file formats support, and Adobe Flash CS3 integration. Shockwave Player 11 was also released.
Version 11.5 added 5.1 channel surround sound audio capabilities, real-time mixing, audio effects and DSP filters. Also, there is added support for H.264-video integration for full-screen and high-definition playback. Other supported formats include: 3D importer for Google SketchUp, streaming support using RTMP and ByteArray datatypes.
I'd like to be able to create games, some simple but others more complex. Adobe Director can export to the Shockwave format and embed into the browser as can Flash. But which is more practical for being able to learn and apply?
The most important thing, the Flash player is available on more than 98% on PC connected to the internet, while shock-wave is at around 60%. More people will play your game if done on Flash than director.
I would say it depends. If you want real time 3D, I would go for Director; Flash 3D (papervision) is very slow. Otherwise, the advantages of Flash (installed base, and online resources) lean the choice towards Flash.
I still use Adobe Director Lingo once a while. There used to be a discussion forum but it's gone. Is there an archive that I may search for answers that people asked before? Is there another public forum for this old software?
list1.sort would make it ["aaa", "bbb","mmm","zzz"], but I'd like to know the changed order is 1, 4, 3, 2 if the original is 1, 2, 3, 4. I need this so I can pick up the value from another related list based on the new order after sorting.
I don't know Lingo, but I've never heard of any language providing such a feature. This very strongly points toward your approach to whatever problem you're trying to solve being fundamentally flawed. Perhaps you need to learn how to use property lists.
I just ran into your link to listserv.uark. I would be interested in accessing the Direct-L folk. I have been using Director for 25+ years and am not getting much support from Adobe these days. (although I still pay them monthly for access to Director 12). Do you have any feel for how many users may still be out there? An I the only one?
Direct-L is still going, and has been more active than usual recently. Valentin has been posting a build of Director that will work in recent versions of macOS. It's actually using the Windows version in a Wine wrapper.
The link I gave above is slightly confusing, in that you have to sign in on that page. I see though that one of the options is to register a password. I guess that will get you through to where you can subscribe.
Thanks for your response, I look forward to seeing the discussion about director on a mac.
I was able this morning to get my password on listserv.uark verified, and logged into the listserv. When I tried to go to Direct-L it gave me the following message:
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