|
03/23/06
As usual, a lot of talk about Director and Shockwave at the conference. At one presentation, the audience was polled about what they use to make games, and 20 or so raised their hands for Director/Shockwave. The Independent Games Festival had several Shockwave entries, including Dodge That Anvil! which won a major prize. And that one uses 3D and Havok.
At one of the parties last night, I talked with a lot of Director developers, plus Thomas Higgins, the product manager for Director at Adobe.
I posted another video podcast late last night on the Experimental GamePlay session. I hope to have more up soon, but the upload speed at both my hotel and the conference is horrible. I was ready with my first video post at lunch yesterday, but I couldn’t get it up on the site until I got back to my hotel in the evening and it still took an hour to upload.
Share This
2 Comments
03/22/06
I’m at the Game Developers Conference this week and I’m working to produce some video podcast news reports for the new CleverMedia TV network. So if you want to find out what is going on at the conference, check out the video podcasts at CleverMedia.TV. My firsts entries are on the Sony keynote, which included some interesting info about the PS3 and the PSP, and the experimental gameplay session. Tonight I’ll be posting about the awards ceremony, including the Independent Games Festival winners.
Share This
Post a Comment
03/15/06
Shockwave Player 10.1.1.016 has been released. This includes the long-awaited Flash 8 Xtra and some Windows QuickTime fixes. The new version is live at the Shockwave download page and should work in ActiveX control updates and such. So we can now start to use Flash 8 content in Shockwave, knowing that the public can get it.
Share This
1 Comment
03/07/06
So I bought my first Intel Mac today. But I’m getting ahead of the story. First, I went to the Apple store and tried out a few things on an Intel MacBook Pro. It was loaded with 1.5 gigs of RAM and a dual processor. But still, I didn’t expect it to work so well when emulating a G5 with Rosetta. I started by going to our Flash games in Safari and they worked fine and fast. This caught me off guard because Safari was running in “Universal” mode — so native for Intel. The Flash plug-in should need Rosetta to run, but it didn’t.
Next, I went to some of our Shockwave games. Now these didn’t work. I expected that. Shockwave is supposed to really require Rosetta, so I switched Safari into Rosetta mode and went back. Then it worked. Not bad either. I would say comparable performance to my G4 PowerBook. I was even testing 3D.
Beyond that, I saw Microsoft Word on the machine and tested it. That worked well too, using Rosetta.
Now the real reason I was there was to get a very low-end office machine for basic administration tasks. I couldn’t see buying a G4/G5 computer at this point, so a nw Intel Mac Mini was the way to go. I decided to get the cheapest one there. I could always upgrade the memory later, and this machine would never be used for multimedia-type tasks. So I got the Intel core solo, with only 512 megs RAM. I expected the worst, but at least I’d have a good baseline machine for testing.
But when I hooked up the mini, I was pleasantly surprised. It is downright zippy. I was told by just about every review out there that I should expect a slow machine unless the RAM was maxed out. But this thing played some 3D Shockwave games just fine. Not great, but better than some low-end PCs, for sure. Plus the native universal Mac apps, like the ones with iLife, worked great. Better than on by G4 PowerBook, no doubt. All for $600. I even got AppleWorks to run on it. I love AppleWorks and thought I’ve have to go without it into the Intel world, but it runs fine under Rosetta.
So I’m pleased that I got a good machine for $600. And I’m also pleased that the Intel Macs seem to be able to run anything I’ve tried so far. This is definitely going to be an easier transition than the OS 9/X transition, or the 68X to PPC transition.
I didn’t get to try Director on the Mini. Thanks to the “activation” scheme for Macromedia/Adobe software I’d have to jump through hoops to do so. But I hear from people “in the know” that Director does work, if slowly. So I’m feeling pretty good about the new machines. Now I just need them to release a 17 inch MacBook Pro!
Share This
2 Comments
03/02/06
I just discovered the Valentin Shell Xtra . I know it has been around for a bit, but this is the first time I’ve have to use it. Wow. Such a simple concept, but so powerful. It just allows you to issue shell commands and get the results. I’m using it on Mac OS X, but there is a Windows version too. Since you can do a bazillion things with shell commands, this makes the Xtra so amazingly powerful. You get the results back as a string or a list. I’m just using it to send a “curl” command which will send a file to a FTP server. But that’s just th tip of the iceburg. Plus, it is free.
Share This
Post a Comment
|
