What Would You Like In the Next Version of Director?
Some of my mailing lists are now discussing “wish lists” for the next version of Director. Some of the suggestions, as usual, are excellent. But I feel that others are way over the top — requests for features that would be hard for the Director engineers to implement but would be rarely used. Or, worse, when someone suggests something that won’t really make it possible to do anything you can’t do now. Like private properties. You can do them now, if you like, but it is up to you to enforce them as Director won’t do it for you. So adding private properties won’t allow you to “make that game that you can’t quite do now because a feature is missing.”
What is on your wish list?
December 21, 2004
• Posted in: General
11 Responses to “What Would You Like In the Next Version of Director?”
One thing I would love to see (and it should be fairly easy to implement) is in the script editor. It can be very confusing when writing long equations to know which parenthasis is closing which statement. What I propose is that it work kind of like Excel where when you close a parenthasis, it should bold or otherwise highlight which opening parenthasis that one is connected to. I have done a few programs where it looks like this:
variable=point(((integer(v1)*3)/2),((3/4)*float(v2)))
and when I go back to make a small change, it takes an hour to figure which bits belong together.
Fix the MIAW debugger bug (currently all property and objects values appear as void in the debugger for errors that occur in a MIAW). This bug was introduced in version 9 (MX). Earlier versions work as expected.
Add code hinting/completion at least for core Director objects.
Add full code colouring for JavaScript syntax (I don’t use JavaScript often, but I know others do).
Fix the MIAW crash bug on Windows machines (when a MIAW forgets itself it generates random projector.exe errors). There are ways around this bug, but it would be easier if a MIAW could forget itself.
How about multiple undos? Sweet mother mary of god, how difficult would it be for them to *finally* give us multiple undos?
It’s the little thing’s that count, and you cant imagine the frustration not being able to step back 3 or 4 steps has caused me….
I would say some type of MovieClip ala Flash, or totally working LDMs(no work arounds). The other item I feel must be given some attention is 3D. Even if a total engine rewrite is not possible, they need to at least build some kind of GUI(think Anark) for the 3D cast member and model/asset manipulation. Oh, and continued improvement of the Flash Xtra(we can always get “bonus” features from the latest Flash ;)), and more documentation/examples of how to get the most out of the Director/Flash combo.
Actionscript 2.0 like OOP in Javascript syntax (with “real classes”, not only prototype implemetation)
Extended Quicktime functionality. ie: eq, panning control and the upcoming recording capabilities rumored in Tiger…
JP
Oh yes, buy out Printomatic and BuddyAPI before the authors get hit by a bus or something. Without those Xtras, most projects would be in deep doo-doo…
I would love to get the ability to collapse my code. So at the beginning of a large “if then” statement, you would be able to click a little arrow of some sort on the beginning of the line and it would collapse it to a single line, this would be a great help for keeping things organized.
Oh… and I would really love to see a Linux engine appear.
1) UNICODE SUPPORT !!!!!!!
2) WORKING LDMs
3) MIAWs DEBUGGING
4) HARDWARE ACCELERATED 3D ANTIALIASING !!!
1) SW3D Additive blending
2) Fix Clonefromcastmember + rigid body Havok bug
Unicode support is a must have!!!
Larger font in the Message and Object Inspector windows.
Seriously Monaco 9 point is just way way to small on my 19″ monitor.
Better yet let us select the font and size as a preference just like the scripting window.
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