Comparison of Multimedia Prowess - Director and Revolution

Malte Brill revolution at derbrill.de
Tue Oct 10 13:59:28 EDT 2006


Hi Greg,

It is true that Director has some out of the box features that makes  
it easier to create things without coding. First of all the metaphor  
is quite different. Director is a timeline tool, that allows  
"tweening". You can set Keyframes for the objects and let director  
perfor the transition from one state to the other along the timeline.  
This is useful for a basic level of things you might want to do.

> Later, I'd like to get more game-like in the genres of the classic  
> "King's
> Quest" adventure style, as well as more action-based 2D games along  
> the
> lines of a side-scroller.

When it comes to scripting games Director isn´t much more helpful  
than any other tool you can get (even though the ability to tween is  
a plus for Director here too). You will still need to set up your  
game logic, deal with writing collision detection routines, AI and  
even motion of your sprites. In other words you will need to tacle  
lots of math and logic. I am trying my best to reduce the pain  
involved with AE and I think I did quite a good job on the way until  
now. Given that you do not like the Javascript like Syntax in  
Director (the last version I own is a copy of MX 2004. It could use  
both JavaScript and Dot syntax ). Revolution is a good choice for the  
type of games you want to make. Easier even in combination with AE.

The downside of Director (At least up to MX 2004) is: It doesn´t look  
native. Nagging exit screens. Less supported platforms. No universal  
binaries. Far more expensive. More Resource hungry.

Downsides of Rev: No flash support. No multichannel Audio Clips. No  
tweening.


> It sure would be nice if there existed some video tutorials showing  
> how to
> do either of these things on either platform.  Then, an objective  
> opinion
> could easily be performed by potential purchasers of either software.

I can not help with the Director part of this. However you might want  
to download the free set of tutorials I wrote:

http://www.derbrill.de/tutorials_e.html

Also if you run a trial of Revolution at the moment you might want to  
trial AE as well:

http://www.runrev.com/section/revselect/arcadeengine/downloads/ae201.zip

It comes with a self contained Documentation stack that might be  
helpful.

> I've casually investigated Malte's
> arcade engine, but that is not exactly everything I would need to  
> emulate some of Director's
> "built-in" functionality.

Eager to learn more here. What do you miss?

All the best,

Malte





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