 | | | Director MX | Director MX 2003-12-06 - By Darrel Plant
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Copy of the note I just sent to GD:
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Dear Editors:
I'd like -- very respectfully -- to take issue with some of the items
in Justin Lloyd's review of Macromedia Director MX ("Game Developer",
December 2003).
Mr. Lloyd makes some valid claims about problems with Director as a
programming environment, particularly in areas where terminology
developed over its two decades of development doesn't mesh with that
of more traditional game development platforms, documentation, and
bugs in the script editing window. However, I feel that some of his
claims are simply due to unfamiliarity with the product.
Macromedia's marketing department has indeed claimed that Director is
a drag and drop environment, but I don't think it's ever claimed that
everything could be done with drag and drop behaviors. The scope of
those behaviors (I worked as a contract behavior developer on
Director 7 and 8) was never intended to do everything for every user.
They were intended for people putting together relatively simple
projects, not games, which require a bit more sophisticated
programming.
Nor is there any need for "spaghetti code" when creating an interface
with "20 or 30 buttons". Certainly, you _can_ do so, but that's true
in almost any environment.
It's true that the Lingo programming language has somewhere between
one and two thousand keywords, but it's not necessary to "learn them
all", as Mr. Lloyd claims.
The Cast panel is described as having "no way to place cast members
into logical groups" for large projects. Not only can a cast's member
resources be sorted by media type in list display mode, but multiple
casts can be created for organizing media. Cast members themselves
can be moved around within an individual cast or to another cast.
Director's timeline-oriented Score came in for some hits in Lloyd's
review as well. However, most advanced Director developers use the
Score sparingly. In fact, Director is flexible enough to let you skip
the Score entirely and handle all of the interface through direct
imaging to the window (through the use of imaging Lingo introduced in
version 8). Some developers are using a single Shockwave 3D sprite
for their interface.
There is, admittedly, a steep learning curve for doing game
development in Director. Mr. Lloyd claims that learning Lingo was
harder than memorizing the Havok or DirectX SDKs. Maybe so, but those
SDKs alone won't get you very far if you're unfamiliar with C, for
instance. Nobody ever said making games was easy. For a certain level
of game, Director can make it easier, but only if you spend some
serious time learning the product.
Director game developers like Gary Rosenzweig (www.clevermedia.com)
and Brian Robbins (www.fuelindustries.com) have been speakers at
recent Game Developer Conferences. There's a lively community of
Director game developers at
(nuttybar.drama.uga.edu/mailman/listinfo/dirgames-l), and the
Director Online Users Group (www.director-online.com) of which I am
the editor has many articles on game-related topics. Despite
limitations that I think Mr. Lloyd and I could agree on, I'd
encourage folks not to write Director off just yet.
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Darrel Plant, Moshofsky/Plant Creative Services
Multimedia Design by Brute Force (SM) http://www.moshplant.com
phone/fax: 503-241-9082 dplant@(protected)
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