Shockwave News

shockwave : what we can get from new Director version

Posted by Den Ivanov on December 17th, 2003

Below just few lines from Tom Higgins post in Dir-3D list.
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I'd like to share a few facts from the very person (me) that did the
Director technology demo at our recent MAX 2003 conference in Salt Lake
City. I presented at the "Sneaks" event which is a technology session
featuring items that the various teams at Macromedia are working on but that
are in not necessarily guaranteed to appear in future releases of our
products. Therefore the three items I showed are to be considered
_possibilities_ and not definitives. What I showed was:

- DVD playback in Director (a Director movie playing DVD content off the
drive), play/pause/etc. ability, chapter and title navigation, event
notification (if the user interacted with the DVD content), etc.

- Flash Performance : I showed a demo with many (I think more than a dozen,
18 maybe) Flash sprites (non-DTS using bgtrans ink) on stage made from three
different SWF members, each SWF animates 10 movie clips using some simple AS
code; I ran them as is now and as expected the performance was chunky and
slow, then I did a little code tweak (one line per member) to invoke a
_single_Flash_Xtra_ instance to drive all Flash sprites (instead of one
instance per sprite) resulting in a huge boost in performance and a drop in
memory usage

- JavaScript syntax in Director, this was NOT ActionScript nor was it
ActionScript 2.0, it was JavaScript syntax (ECMA 262v3/JS1.5 compliant),
most of the code in the above two demos was written in Director using JS
syntax, access to the Director object and event models, Regular Expression
searching for JS syntax code, etc., Lingo and JS can both be used
(translation: Lingo isn't going to die soon so don't panic )