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With Director 8.5, Macromedia promises developers the ability to deliver dazzling 3D entertainment on the web. Not only do they deliver on this promise, but they have exceeded many people's expectations. Using Director 8.5, developers can create 3D web-based games that are small, run reasonably fast, and operate cross-platform for Windows and Mac.
Obviously, the biggest change from Director 8.0 to 8.5 is the addition of the 3D rendering engine. However, in addition to the 3D engine, Director 8.5 and the new Shockwave Multi-User Server 3.0 support UDP messaging. This is the first step toward being able to offer truly realtime multiplayer gaming through Shockwave. Director 8.5 now also supports embedded Flash 5 files, and RealVideo through Shockwave.
Director 8.5 offers very easy access for developers to create 3D content. Using Director's built-in programming language (called Lingo), developers can create four basic types of primitives: sphere, box, cylinder, and plane. However, possibly the most useful feature is the ability to create an arbitrary mesh via Lingo. This allows developers to create any object by passing in the vertex data for the faces. The possibilities for this feature are practically limitless. One developer has even created a tool that reads in and creates the geometry for a QUAKE level using this technique. Another interesting feature which can be accessed without requiring modeling software is particle systems. While this is not a necessary feature for any 3D engine, it is a very welcome one. The particle systems run reasonably fast and provide an easy way for developers to create effects such as smoke, fire, sparks, and so on.
The true power of Director 8.5 is seen when models are created in modeling packages and imported into Director. It supports the new Shockwave3D, or .W3D, file format. Several companies have committed to creating exporters for this format. At the time of this writing, Discreet has an exporter available for 3DS Max 3.1 and 4.0, Alias|Wavefront has an exporter for Maya 3, and Caligari has included their Shockwave 3D exporter into TrueSpace 5.1. According to Macromedia, exporters for Lightwave and Softimage are in beta testing or ready for release soon.
Aside from not requiring artists to learn a new program to create models for Director 8.5, another benefit of...