[casual_games] Question About Adobe/Macromedia Director as aDevelopment Platform....

[Allen Partridge]

TR,

I've compared several potential dev environments for casual titles lately. I
generally have used Director to develop games because I can work faster and
with less time spent re-inventing the wheel. The problem is not as simple to
solve as you might think.

Yes you can make x-plat browser apps with shockwave, but they won't ever
resize as gracefully as vector based apps and a lot of portals are set up to
work with either Flash, but fewer work as gracefully with Shockwave and / or
Java / ActiveX.

Neither Director or Flash apps port nicely to some of the console / digital
cable kinds of app environments that are becoming more and more available -
so while off the top portability is great, long term portability to various
other hardware devices is basically a back to the drawing board proposal.

There are a couple of more exposed code lib based setups that some folks are
using (Popcap framework, SDL, Torque, Unity, etc.) that might make the
portability question easier, but will undoubtedly take longer to develop
with than Director. Director gives you just about everything you could need,
but mm/adobe hasn't been very good about keeping the shockwave ubiquity
numbers up.

You can also do considerably more with Flash than in earlier versions. There
are several wrappers out there (Jugglor and the like) that will give you the
sort of engine to system access that Director allows, and ActionScript in
the latest version is remarkably faster than past versions. One of our
latest titles is in Flash (because of ubiquity in browser concerns) and the
other Director (because animation performance in Director is faster.)

You might also want to look into the popcap framework, bc I believe they
offer an activeX browser app.

So thoughts about Director specifically... well Lingo is an object oriented
language (template based) that performs very quickly. The advantage Director
gives is that it's run-time extensible. That means you can do most anything
you like as long as you're able to package it in an extra. It also has meant
that things that probably should have long ago been built into the engine,
continue to require xtra functionality. So you need to do things like add an
xtra to resize the screen, print effectively etc. 

The biggest change for me in modern versions of Director is the Object
inspector. This allows you to view all variables and objects in real time -
even editing them while you author. Sort of takes debugging to the next
level. It's very hard for me to work in other environments now bc I'm so
dependent on it to see exactly what's happening beneath the hood.

Disadvantages include an increasingly outdated sound and text engine, and an
increasing reliance on flash to do various specialized net operations. If
you want 3D, Director is a solid option. Also worth noting that you get the
vector and transform math functions in Director, so you have some nice extra
math functionality there. Also if you haven't used Director in a while, you
probably don't realize that you can easily embed Flash into Director and
then use Actionscript (or JS for that matter) to talk back and forth between
Director and Flash.  (Director now let's you choose Javascript or Lingo for
any given script.) If you want some level of security, director is probably
a better option than flash. In the end, the question really is, do you have
the money / time to develop slowly with better control or do you develop it
quickly, because the roi in casual games is typically low and you can always
recreate a hit game quickly in C++ or .NET or  whatever.

We keep opting for the prebuilt engines because they let us get the game out
quickly (read cheaply.) It isn't necessarily the 'best' solution, but it
seems to be the most 'cost effective.' Using director I can 'mock up' the
game play for most any casual game in a day or two - that means that the
remaining time can go to adjusting the art and the gameplay - and
occasionally adding some cool extra features.

The same is basically true of flash, though I have to admit that there's
still more cursing involved as js case sensitivity usually makes me
irritable. Also I have to write some code in AS, that Director already has
built in's for (think string access, list access etc. are generally a little
more flushed out.) It isn't that you can't easily do these things in flash,
just that you have to write a little library of basic functions to do much
with arrays and strings.

Hth,

--al

-----Original Message-----
From: casual_games-bounces at igda.org [mailto:casual_games-bounces at igda.org]
On Behalf Of T. R.
Sent: Saturday, February 10, 2007 12:54 PM
To: casual_games at igda.org
Subject: [casual_games] Question About Adobe/Macromedia Director as
aDevelopment Platform....

Hello,

I am interested in hearing educated opinions about the use of 
Adobe/Macromedia Director as a casual game development platform. I have some

experience programming in Director (but have not used it for a number of 
years), and recognize that many casual games feature a Web demo, as well as 
a downloadable version. Director/Shockwave would allow the same modified 
code to be used for both.

To any persons with experience with Director:

Does the program offer a rich enough development platform and scripting 
language for Puzzle or Action games? I'm familiar with Lingo, but do not 
know how the language has developed in the past few years to address the 
needs of casual game developers.

Any opinions would be much appreciated.

T.R.

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