Adobe Director

1

• Adobe Director
• for professional game development

Develop Better Games Faster Using Director you
can create entertainment games, serious games in
3D and 2D quickly, and publish them for online or
downloaded game play.
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Adobe Director for professional game development

• We are going to describe following topics
• Adobe Director for coders
• Adobe Director for 3D artists
• Shockwave 3D engine improvements
• Shockwave 3D and Flash integration

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Adobe Director for online browser based games

• We believe in the great future of 3D online
  browser games
• Browser based MMO
• Habbo Hotel
• SocioTown
• Sherwood
• Lively
• Runescape
• Dofus
• Large amount of casual games

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Adobe Director for professional game development

• Why we've chosen Adobe Director?
• Shockwave is trusted brand for end users
• Why we've made this presentation?
• because of complexity of pipeline creation for
  professional game development
• because of annoying bugs and poor documentation
• because of obsolete 3D engine in Shockwave plugin

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Adobe Director for coders

• What's important for coders
• Language
• Build process automation
• Integration with 3rd party software
• Profiling tools
• Documentation
• As a matter of fact coders do not need IDE
  inside Adobe Director

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Adobe Director for coders
Language

• We do not use Lingo because of lack of OOP
  support
• We use extended version of JavaScript (extended
  through our own preprocessor and runtime
  library)?
• Namespaces and ActionScript like files includes
• (import director.CastMember)?
• Classes and inheritance
• Macro definitions, ifdef, ifndef and other
  useful preprocessor features
• coroutines

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Adobe Director for coders
Language

• Request
• Language features
• OOP
• includes
• preprocessing
• coroutines
• runtime optimizations
• JIT-compiling
• Actually JavaScript2 or ActionScript3 have all
  pointed features and can be used as programming
  languages inside Adobe Director.

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Adobe Director for coders
Build process automation

• What we have now
• We've made a set of command line utilities that
  automate build process Play, Publish, Execute
  Script. These utilities use WinAPI (window
  messages).
• What we need
• Support of command line batch commands (open,
  play, publish)?

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Adobe Director for coders
Integration with 3rd party software

• Problem
• To use version control system we need to store
  scripts as separate files (now we have about 1000
  scripts).
• Using external editor is more comfortable for
  coders. Existing integration with 3rd party
  editors is very poor and not suitable for
  professional development

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Adobe Director for coders
Integration with 3rd party software

• What we have now
• We assemble about 1000 separate script files in a
  single bundle
• Then create new Director project from template,
  attach script bundle and publish project
• Desirable solution
• Better support for 3rd party software integration
  (especially code editors)?

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Adobe Director for coders
Profiling tools

• Problem
• There's no utility to profile memory taken by
  Shockwave 3D engine.
• There's no code profiler
• Existing debugger do not work with scripts larger
  than 1024 lines.

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Adobe Director for coders
Profiling tools

• What we have now
• We use simple timing measurements for profiling
  code
• We can not monitor memory of 3D engine
• We can not monitor render time
• Request
• Profiling tools

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Adobe Director for coders
Documentation

• We need documentation and well-designed samples

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Adobe Director for 3D artists

• Our 3D artists and game designers don't use
  Director authoring environment by now
• What they really need
• 3D properties editor and 3D asset manager
• Basic tools for editing scenes (objects
  arrangement, shading) for game and level
  designers
• Ease of import process. Popular 3D modeling
  packages file formats import support.

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Shockwave 3D engine improvements

• What we need and what should modern 3D engine
  provide in 2008
• Animation system improvements (more advanced
  animation blending, Inverse Kinematics and so
  on)?
• Hardware shaders support (custom or common lib
  with the most common ones)?

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Shockwave 3D and Flash integration

• High performance rendering from Flash to textures
  with ActionScript execution
• Textures in overlays and backdrops for easy HUD
  creation
• Static, animated and generated vector textures
  for traffic reducing
• High performance overlapping Flash Movie above
  Shockwave3D (not direct to stage option)