The cool thing about the Flash integration a.o. is that it gives you access to h.264 video content as well as handling CD/DVD content which is done via Flash.
What can I say…I’m never, ever going back to Director after the horrible treatment of the Mac customers during the Intel transition. Cost me a lot of time/money, that did.
In fact, I’m going so far to distance myself from Adobe products whenever I can (not that easy if you do print stuff…).
Sorry for the rant. 
Oh i can understand you but i’ll use whatever get’s the job done best i’ll have to do and for some you need some of those features. Also requested some more than once but they never made it into Unity, so…
Any info on whether the new DirectX 9 renderer in Shockwave 11 will just use the DX9 interface for the same old capabilities, or they are going to actually expose shaders, render textures and whatnot?
As it’s written there Dir11 won’t be the big 3d engine upgrade, that should happen in the successor. Dir11 is mainly about Unicode, Flash9 support, Intel support on Mac, DX9 support on win, Ageia Physics. Things a lot of developers have been waiting for a long time. You don’t always need dozens of new features. Often it’s more important getting the right ones, those you actually need and that those work reliable (which also Dir11 has to proof first). I like the price region they are offering the tool at, a region i also would have liked seeing Unity in as it would make it easier for some to step into.
Some nice features:
The extremely short description of DirectX9 makes me think it’s not going to enable new features, just merely use D3D9 interface for rendering. That’s fair enough, of course. We’ll see what it actually means soon.
…is shockwave player is dropping support for Pentium III and older CPUs? :roll:
Well, the best official information i could find…at least this gives you some further time coming up with a reliable and working shadow solution for all systems! ;O)
So the Director 11 IDE is out, but an OSX version of Shockwave Player 11 is still missing in action – the download Shockwave 11 points to the old “not Intel native” download page if you go to it with an Intel Mac.
Boo!
Reading > Understanding > Enlightment
It will be nice if this means OS X/Intel gets a shockwave plugin.
That said, Director is still essentially abandonware. They’re simply revving it to sell upgrades to the folks who can’t live without it.
They’ve swapped physics engines and recompiled it against newer APIs. Big whoop.
BTW: Director already had H264 support through WMP and QuickTime, so adding Flash 9 H264 support isn’t exactly ground-breaking.
I will say this – the $299 (cough $598 for both platforms) upgrade fee (for anyone with 8.5 or newer) is reasonably modest, and seems to indicate that they’re trying to reclaim their developers.
Edit: I take it back, they added cross-platform projector publishing in MX 2004.
Believe me direct h.264 support via flash is a thousend times prettier. It would be one of those 20 features you need and not one of those 180 features you don’t.
I work with Flash and QuickTime video every day, and sorry it’s not 1000x prettier. It’s … the same.
The Flash plugin does allow compositing (in Director and web browsers) more nicely than QuickTime, but that’s a function of poor QuickTime implementation in Director, and Apple’s (questionable) decisions re: fullscreen support.
I work with Flash and QuickTime video every day, and sorry it’s not 1000x prettier. It’s … the same.
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Nope it’s not, stream in content, and no weird issues with certain windows machines.
Flash and QuickTime stream if you set it up server-side. If you don’t they don’t. Again, same deal. Last time I checked, QuickTime streaming server was substantially more free.
H264’s container format is QuickTime by the way.
I can’t speak to that. Flash is of course 100% compatible with everything, right?
BTW I’d be a lot more impressed if Director 11 claimed to be supporting some useful 3d file formats. FBX? Collada? It’s possible that they do support some useful formats, but if so the PR people don’t realize how important it is.
I can’t speak to that. Flash is of course 100% compatible with everything, right?
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In one project i was thinkig of specifically oh yes this was a lot better.
BTW I’d be a lot more impressed if Director 11 claimed to be supporting some useful 3d file formats. FBX? Collada? It’s possible that they do support some useful formats, but if so the PR people don’t realize how important it is.
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Yep it’s not the Dir which comes with the big 3d engine enhancements but is known since some time, right?! Will be in the successor to this version. Beside from thi,s this version includes some of the most needed fixes. Combine those with the features which are Dir/Flash only and you know what you can use it for and what not.
I’ve had projects where, for example, IT refused to install QuickTime for some reason. The only issues I’ve seen with respect to QuickTime actually being incompatible with a specific PC concerns graphics acceleration (essentially some hardware acceleration fails, you turn it off in the control panel, problem fixed.)
But if you’re arguing technical superiority, I think there’s no real evidence one way or the other. (Note that QuickTime makes much better use of hardware acceleration than Flash does.)
Director 11 looks good chiefly from a compatibility standpoint and the fact that Adobe seems to care more about Director than many of us feared (after, for example, it was completely omitted from several major press releases during the merger).
I guess I’ll be paying Adobe another $299 :-/