After numerous rantings, rumours and postponements, the long-awaited update to Director MX 2004, Director 11 is being released in March 2008. At the Adobe MAX 2007 conference, held in Chicago in October 2007, some of the first news about Director 11 was released.
The official Director 11 product release details will be revealed between 18th – 22nd February at GDC 2008 in San Francisco.
Updates to existing features in Director 11
Aggressive educational version for $99 and possible price-drop for the commercial package; improved workflow; dockable panels (thereby eliminating the ultimate need for a dual-screen setup); Script browser; improved paint window; DirectX 9 and Flash 9 support.
New features in Director 11
3D save feature; 3D displacement map filter; Windows Vista and Mac Intel support.
Less-positive points about Director 11
Havok engine discontinued; no updates to the 3D engine; no updates to the sound engine; no updates to the multi-user server.
There is also an amateur Flash video of the Director 11 talk available to watch here – be aware that unfortunately the sound quality is absolutely terrible…
Click here to download the Shockwave Player from Adobe
An interesting take on the delay from a renown Director guru, Dean Utian, is that
“Adobe inherited a product that was given little attention by Macromedia since the last update back in 2004. Even prior to MX 2004, some areas of the product features were being neglected. So, Adobe have found that it’s been a huge task to get Director back on track. They are putting resources into it. However, Director is very far behind where it should be and will take Adobe at least 2 versions to get it to the right level. D11 will hopefully be a starting point. Adobe have started talking about Director 12.”
Another interesting fact that crops up in the video clip is that there appears to have only been 14 people in the Director 11 development team! That does seem like a small number…
The one thing that agitates me about Director is the decreasing Shockwave Player install base, especially compared with the success that the Flash Player has had. Even though D11 won’t have the option to publish Movies into Flash, it would be very useful if Director 12 included this feature – but somehow I don’t think this will happen. Maybe a way round this would be to include the Shockwave player with the Flash player?
Either way, we’ll soon find out what the new features will be in D12.
