Adobe Director 11 is designed for creating interactive applications, games, e-learning material and simulations.
Director 11, alone or with Adobe Shockwave Player, lets users create content once and publish it to the web, CD or DVD, and the desktop. Authors can add Adobe Flash SWF files to Director projects, play them in Director and Shockwave, and edit them with Adobe Flash CS3. The release also supports third-party extensions, Unicode localization, Ageia PhysX for motion in games and simulations, enhanced text, and native 3D rendering.
“Director 11 lets users expand their creative options and audience by creating more multimedia applications in less time,” said Adobe senior vice president for Print and Publishing Naresh Gupta. He described it as a flexible development environment that extends Adobe’s tools into interactive 3D animation and games.
Faster programming
Director 11 supports common audio, video and graphics formats. New features include Adobe Flash 9 support and bitmap filters for applying effects such as shadows and glows to text or images. The product supports JavaScript and Director’s native Lingo scripting language. An expanded script browser is designed to reduce programming time through drag-and-drop handling of code and code snippets.
“No other technology can deliver hardware-accelerated 3D entertainment on a website to so many people worldwide as Director and Shockwave,” said MaidMarian.com founder and CEO Gene Endrody. He said Director 11 improved the development of action-oriented interactive 3D games and virtual products across platforms.
Pricing and availability
Adobe expected Director 11 to become available at the end of May 2008, with German, French and Japanese versions following in June. The full product was expected to cost approximately €999 excluding VAT, with upgrades from any of the previous three versions at approximately €299 excluding VAT. Students, teachers, lecturers and other educational employees could purchase it for approximately €299 excluding VAT. Supported systems included Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2, Windows Vista and Mac OS X 10.4 on Intel-based Macs. Shockwave also supported Mac OS X 10.4 on PowerPC-based Macs.
