One less competitor...

General Discussions
#1

For a while, after looking at some of the stuff it can do, I have been thinking that Director is likely to be eating a bunch of market share that would otherwise have belonged to Java. However, I’ve been doing some work with it over the last week in the day job and I swear it is the most astoundingly developer-unfriendly, annoying, incomprehensible, random, vile and repugnant tool I have ever used in my life.

Flash is an absolute pleasure to use compared to director and I’m not at all keen on working with that.

How Director ever made any kind of release I cannot possibly imagine.

#2

Why? If you explain, people that don’t use Director (like me) can hate it too! ;D

#3

I totaly agree, I was forced once to make a game in director for a customer. I tell you, many new swearwords was invented during that time. ;D

#4

Imagine you are using a scripting environment, perhaps a little like Flash, if you have ever used that.

It has it’s own bizarre scripting language “Lingo” that is meaningless to anyone who has ever done any programming in their life, but fortunately it can also use an ECMA style JavaScript variant. Or can it? There is no discernable documentation and although you can write Object Oriented code in either Lingo or Javascript it is only vaguely oriented towards objects and is mostly oriented to stupid. If you want to change something, you might decide to check the help files, but unfortunately they don’t contain any documentation for the Javascript so you have to look for the Lingo documentation. Sometimes they have documents for that which you can use to work out what the Javascript would be. Other times you don’t. I have found entries that say “this method is deprecated- you should use newMethod() instead” where newMethod is completely undocumented. Sometimes you can only find things in the help file by using the search facility, other times you can only find things by browsing the document tree.

Often your code will stop working for no clear reason until you quit Director and then when you load it again, your code will work again.

At best you only have partial control over stuff through code. There is a syntax colouring system in the code editor that colourises every command or method name, regardless of whether it is a method of the object you are using. It is aimed at Lingo, though, and misses out on Javascript methods if they don’t have the same name as their Lingo equivalents. It also ignores case although the Javascript is case sensitive.

Over the last few years of using it, I came to the conclusion that Flash was written by a bunch of halfwit monkeys with no idea of how to write an application, but now I realize that at least they were monkeys. I have no idea what was responsible for director, but I guess someone’s cat walked across a keyboard, by chance what they had written compiled and Macromedia decided to charge a thousand quid for the result.

Worst. Product. Ever.

#5

Man! I hope I never ever come to need to use it!

#6

I actually don’t mind it for its original purpose - that of CD-ROM based media… not that anyone bothers to make those kind cheap tacky things these days. :wink:

#7

I think if you really want to make a product like that and really do it right, you need to start by building the scripting environment and then build all the stuff you can do as a designer on the way the scripting works. What Macromediocre have done in Director is to start with the Designer side and then tack the scripting on to that, which is fine as long as you don’t need to do anything complicated with it.

Flash is similar, but a bit less weak because at least Actionscript has been javascript-like for a few releases and it mostly works. Not how you expect it to work, admittedly, but it works…