Macromedia’s 3D Musketeers

Pushing aggressively to keep its flagship Director authoring tool at the front of the rich media pack, Macromedia has released the $1,199 Director 8.5 Shockwave Studio. Like previous Directors, it’s available for both PC and Mac, and the upgrade is a bargain ($199). Don’t be fooled by the minor version number change (8 to 8.5) — this upgrade is anything but trivial. Director 8.5 produces executables that run faster, lets you incorporate RealVideo and RealAudio, and has a long laundry list of updates and fixes. But what’s got people talking is the 3D-on-the-Internet capability — the result of intensive research and work with Intel to take the best of existing 3D technologies and implement them in Director, as well as the new Shockwave Player 8.5.

Feeling déjà vu? It’s probably because 3D on the Internet has actually been around for quite some time, using standards like the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML). So, why all the fuss?

VRML required a large plug-in, and had very limited platform and browser support. Millions of users have the Shockwave player installed, and it comes pre-installed with most computers (PC and Mac) and browsers. The other kicker is that Director 8.5 integrates 3D technology into a proven, mature environment. Developers have been programming in Director a long time, creating client/server apps and games and writing Xtras to allow it to talk to databases and read media types. While we are only going to focus on the 3D aspects in this review, Director is still much, much more than just this set of technologies.

The World of 3D

All right, you’re excited … So, what is Shockwave 3D? Simply put, it is a set of Lingo (the programming language of Director) commands and a new cast-member (the structure that Director uses to hold any media) type that allows you to embed a virtual world in the stage (the window of the application that you are developing) of a Shockwave movie. Okay, not that simple. The graphics routines that drive the world reach down into the operating system and interact with either OpenGL or Microsoft’s Direct X abstraction layers to then talk directly to graphics boards in the user’s machine. Director programmers finally have access to the hardware that professional game developers have been using for years to get the graphics speed and capabilities to make today’s hottest games.

Macromedia has made it very clear to anyone examining this package that Shockwave 3D is for programmers, preferably the geeky kind that already know about 3D and transform math. Yes, there are behavior libraries, so you can code less, and, yes, you can import content from 3D authoring packages. But at the end of the day, building a full-blown "Shockwave Everquest" type of experience will require very technical skills, and most likely a team of people.

So, being passionate about both game programming and the Lingo language, I ripped open the box and got to work, starting by animating a simple sphere. It was easy … almost. The 3D stuff has been plunked into Director in a cast-member type called #Shockwave3D. You make one of these #Shockwave3D cast members and drag it onto the stage.

Now what? Well, that’s the thing. If you don’t have content to import, you have to build it by hand, and you really have to understand the guts (scene graphs) of worlds that Shockwave 3D creates to build content by hand. You also have to program your models in Lingo instead of creating them with GUI tools, as with other 3D authoring tools. While it is a very capable system, it is unlike anything else, and takes some getting used to.