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So I was at GDC and visited the Adobe booth for a hands-on demo with Director
11. Sadly I have to report that my initial impressions of the product were
underwhelming. Especially for something that has been a long time coming.
There booth was small and there and was empty - so I had one of the developers
demoing it for me all to myself. At first glance it was hard to see what has
changed. The interface looked fairly similar with some UI improvements, like
docking and the like, while he insisted that there was much better support for
Javascript users, which I was happy about. I totally forgot to ask whether or
not multiple undo was finally added sadly (I hope so!). Them bringing back
support for a physics SDK, this time Ageia (nVidia), is great news. Some people
would argue PhysX is better and easier to work with than Havok.
The one that was disappointing was the lack of networking features. There is
no plans for making Flash Media Server support UDP, and I couldn't get a
straight answer regarding bringing Multiuser Server back to life. I told him
that network performance especially for games was very important if they wanted
serious people using it for either casual/web-based games or for prototyping,
and sadly the impression that he gave me during the presentation was that Adobe
invested just enough to keep their current hardcore base satisfied, not to
attract new users to the product.
I wish it wasn't the case, but it's too little, too late I'm afraid. I'll give
Director 11 a chance, but I'm already on the hunt for some other
rapid-prototyping game building tools to replace it.
:frown;
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