Category: Director

The July 15, 2004 edition of the Wall Street Journal (article not available online except to subscribers), contained an article titled “Poppit! Who Knew? Low-Tech Videogames Now Are Hot” with some information of interest to Director and Shockwave (and Flash) developers, although none of those technologies are mentioned specifically. Some selected exerpts:

“The mass market for online gaming, like it or not, is among older women with children playing casual games,” says Matthew Bromberg, general manager of the games division of Time Warner Inc.’s America Online unit. “It certainly runs counter to how the videogame industry thinks of itself.”

With a strong audience, casual games offer a gender-bending case for how the conventional videogame industry can rev up its presence in the U.S. online market. One-third of Yahoo’s game players are women 35 or over. Electronic Arts Inc.’s Pogo.com Web site has 14 million players per month, 55% of them are women.

At AOL, online games are the biggest activity after e-mail and instant messaging, logging 10 million players per month. DFC Intelligence, a San Diego market-research firm, forecasts that there will be over 100 million casual gamers world-wide by the end of the year.

The most popular titles are variations on simple classics—card games like poker and bingo—and represent a new zone for relaxing and socializing. Game traffic is heaviest in the afternoon and evening hours, when there are large numbers of women at home.

For game-makers, the economics of casual games are the most compelling. While cutting-edge videogames can take years and millions of dollars to produce, casual games—which lack the realistic graphics, epic battles, and strategic team play common to big budget console titles—are designed by a few people, often for $100,000 or less. [emphasis added]

The article’s available from the WSJ site for $2.95, although you might be able to dig up a copy of Thursday’s Marketplace section if you get the lead out. Just a little something to add to your list of persuasive documents for potential clients (it’s a lot shorter than the IDGA white papers).

The Netherlands cranks out another impressive piece of work in the form of Aldo Hoeben and fieldOfView’s 3D panorama viewer: SPi-V (pronounced “spiffy”). It combines high-quality static 3D and photographic images with animation.

Many, many years ago, Kai Krause’s crack team of developers came up with one of the first cheap 3D tools. Like the rest of his tools, it sported an unconventional interface. Bryce could render (very slowly in those days) beautiful scenes of bizarre terrains, and it’s remained a staple of 3D dabblers and professionals over much of the past decade. Its most recent home has been at Corel, but it’s recently been acquired by 3D content developers DAZ Productions, Inc.

The past weekend saw a couple of threads on dirGames-L about the new Shockwave Player update, which includes a Yahoo! toolbar as a part of the install in addition to the ever-popular shockwave.com redirect.

Troy Hipolito of shockwaveserver.com kicked off the “Yahoo b + SW install official word?” subject on Friday, with 4 questions that were answered by Macromedia Director Product Manager Tom Higgins. Of course, a number of others added their thoughts as well.

On Saturday, first-time poster Peter Witham of Evolution Data posted a thoughtful rubric under the heading “Yahoo (Shockwave) player my take”.

Take my Yahoo! toolbar, please!

Macromedia’s Tom Higgins now has his own blog. One of us. One of us.

Kristl Honda of Clark College in Vancouver, WA passed this note on to me:

Programmer I Macromedia Lingo
Posted 6.2.2004

Major duties and responsibilities include creating new and modifying existing Macromedia Director Lingo scripts. Job requires understanding of Macromedia Director, Flash and Lingo. Experience with XML, HTML, PHP, SQL and Linux is a plus.

Please send resume to Oregon Center for Applied Science, Inc., 1839 Garden Ave., Eugene, OR 97403, e-mail: hr@orcasinc.com or fax: 541-342-4270. No phone calls, please.

If you want any info about Eugene, I can give my impressions from growing up there, but they are about 15 years out of date. A lot of people like it there!

Raman Pfaff of the Macromedia Site of the Day-worthy Explore Learning site noticed that Apple is offering a Director’s Special: a $300 rebate if you buy DVD Studio Pro 3 and Macromedia Director MX 2004, and an extra $200 rebate if that’s combined with a Power Mac G5.

Ullala, of 3DPI fame, has three user interface control behaviors available. They’re used in 3DPI, and are implemented with imaging Lingo. Check out the Slider, Wheel, and Button behaviors! Thanks to Raman Pfaff of Explore Learning for pointing these out.

FarbFlash‘s Alex da Franca reports that a number of people had asked him about the menuing system he used in his FindAll and ScriptingXtrasList tools. He’s rewritten and separated the code for the menu, and made it available on his site for your delectation!

Alex da Franca of FarbFlash has updated two of his helpful Director authoring Xtras.

FindAll, which does search and replace functions on cast members, now works with the PregEx Xtra to provide searching with regular expressions, Multiple instances can be opened. All uses of selected members can be found in the Score,

ScriptingXtrasList lists scripting Xtras and methods. It now scans for any Xtras used by the scripting Xtra.