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Adobe's Allen Partridge on Director's Past, Present, and Future
Director is back, it goes to 11, and it's ready for action
Naturally, questions are going to be raised when any software product takes a four-year hiatus, especially when the program in question happens to be a stalwart multimedia veteran like Director, the eleventh version of which was finally released several months back. Enter Adobe's Director Evangelist, Allen Partridge. Allen started out in design, but eventually dove headfirst into Director programming, giving him a unique perspective of the product from several different angles. Allen was kind enough to sit down recently for a candid discussion on where Director has been, is now, and where it may be going.
Kevin Schmitt: First off, can you tell us a little about your background and how you came to be in the position of Director Evangelist for Adobe?
Allen Partridge: I was working on my doctorate at Texas Tech University, and I was very fascinated by hypermedia and the concept of media and interactivity in general. These were the early days of the World Wide Web, and the whole phenomenon was pretty interesting to me, so I asked folks for advice, and at that time Director was absolutely the predominant way that a non-programmer could come into the programming space. I think that’s really still true today, that [Director is] fulfilling Marc Canter’s vision of a tool that allows the everyday person to approach making software in a practical way. So that’s how I got involved [with Director] — I literally ate and consumed 1000-page Director manuals over the course of two or three weeks for a while. I didn’t sleep; I sort of digested all that information and really had an incredibly good time. From that point, I started making games and little widgets and support materials for courses I was teaching. (In fact, I’m still a university professor today — I teach at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.) I was generally teaching things related to design and [specifically] theatrical design, and I came to the realization one day that I was spending more time programming games and applications than I was doing my actual design-related work! So I thought, "Hmmm... it’s probably time for a career shift."
I found a really interesting shift [when I moved] to a place called the Dramatic Media Laboratory at the University of Georgia, and there I was able to focus much more heavily on programming and on creating interactive things, but still be in an artist-focused space. It was at that point that I really made sort of a full-fledged shift — I became very active in the Director community. I don’t know if you remember Andrew Cherry — great guy — he ran the dirGames-L list for a long time, which is a really powerful and active community. Andrew came to a point where he was having a career shift or something and he needed to let go of the list, and so he asked for volunteers, and I saw it as an opportunity. I was at the University of Georgia, so I jumped right on it and said, "you know what, this looks like a great idea. I have the resources here, let’s make that happen." So I started hosting the dirGames-L list, which was really my first love, and then as we hit the [Director 8.5] "Tron" beta I was in an environment that was completely 3D-saturated, and I already had been really excited about arts and about interactivity, so all of the things in Tron that has to do with 3D were just dead-on for me. So I really went crazy during the Tron era.
I was [also] the technical editor for Director’s Third Dimension for Paul Catanese, and at that same point then Paul introduced me to the acquisitions editors there at Sams, and we went ahead with my own book about Director, Real-Time Interactive 3D Games. And so over the years I got more and more immersed and more and more interested, and [I] loved to write about [Director, and I] wrote a lot of tutorials and that sort of thing.
As far as how I came to be the evangelist, it’s funny... Adobe contacted me, and I said, "you know, I’m a university professor," so it took a lengthy courtship for me to be persuaded that it was worth pursuing. One of the things I think is wonderful about it is that they were great about letting me stick to my guns about still being able to teach some classes, because I really love that contact with the students.
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KS: You [actually] started out in graphic design [about] 12-14 years [ago], which places you in the early 90’s. I don’t want to put you on the spot, but can you give a quick impression of how Director has evolved over that time? What a lot of people probably don’t get today is a sense of the product’s historical importance in the field of multimedia development, and I assume you [bring a sense] of that history with you when you [talk about] this current version, so can you give a little historical perspective on how Director was really one of the driving forces behind the adoption of multimedia in the 90s?
AP: Absolutely. I mean, it’s an incredibly powerful tool, right? Essentially, what happened is Marc Canter and some guys... in fact, Dan Sadowski, who was I think employee number 3 at Macromedia, still works on Director today! So Mark and Dan and some other guys got together, and Mark had this vision of a piece of software that would make other software. And [it] was really important that it be easy enough to use that an artist or a business guy or whomever could actually use it to make software, and that concept was just so incredibly ahead of its time. We’re talking more than 20 years ago now — in fact, right about the time we released Director 11 was the the 20th anniversary of Director. So we’re talking about the definitive multimedia engine; [it] really dates all the way back. So [Director] was used for kiosks, for CD ROMs, everything you remember — from your kids’ various educational software and children's games and so forth and so on to even some significant titles. Some fun, historic trivia — Star Trek: The Next Generation, you know all those animated panels on the starships, those are all Director.
KS: Yeah! I remember reading that somewhere at the time, and of course, me being a Star Trek geek [and just getting started with Director], I said, "Hey, I use that too!" It kind of made it even more approachable.
AP: Exactly. It’s so pervasive, and it makes sense when you think about it because even here, 20 years later, Director remains the only solution that’s really readily extensible, and that has a huge library of options for extensibility. I always hesitate when I say extensible, because it’s such a geek phrase, right? So what we’re really saying is you can actually take new functionality that doesn’t exist in the core engine, and write it in C++, and then stick it on, and extend what Director or Shockwave are capable of doing while they’re running. I always say it’s like if I’m doing software and somebody comes to me — one of my producers comes to me — and says, "Hey, I’ve got this great opportunity for a gig with this museum, and they need to have an interactive installation where as people reach out and touch a table, these videos have to start flying and that sort of thing," and I always say well, it’s sort of "oh, shoot" software — that’s the soft way to put it, right? "Oh, shoot" software, because you view that request from your producer and you know the revenue stream, and that it’s an opportunity, but really, if you start thinking about it, how are you going to implement that, even today? You’re going to implement it with Director, because you’ve got the ability to extend it, to set up some cameras to be able to see what’s happening in the space, to communicate data in and out even if you’re going do remote sensors — any of that kind of stuff actually becomes really plausible with Director and with virtually any other software solution or engine it’s going to be really expensive and time-consuming, and you’re going to write it from the ground up. So, those opportunities are really cool, and they’ve been in there for a long, long time.
So, historically, then, we saw this rise of multimedia, we saw a huge amount of emphasis on kiosks, etc., we saw a pretty substantial number of pieces that [were] education, e-learning, that kind of thing, and we saw all the CD ROMs and the games, and all that kind of thing. And then in 1995 we did Shockwave. At that point, Shockwave was the definitive Web plugin. There really wasn't another major multimedia solution. You had an animated GIF, and then you had Shockwave. So a massively powerful solution [was] suddenly interjected into what was really a very young Web space, and so we saw just an explosion of content and lots of lots of online media then went into the Shockwave space.
So then we get into the modern era, and Macromedia introduces Flash because it's vector-savvy, and it performs really rapidly, and it's capable of having small downloads in the browser. Really, if you think about Flash you think about the rich internet application space, [and] Flash is a tool that is designed specifically for it, right? Whereas Director was a tool that was adapted for it, and that means Director is all about manipulating pixels and images, and Flash is all about manipulating vectors and those sorts of things. So as we got into the Flash era, we saw [a] rise in the acceptance of Flash and the adoption of Flash, and we saw at the same time that a lot of the multimedia development was moving over more strongly in that direction. So one of the things that we looked at in the Director 11 release was what are the key differentiating factors, what are the things that make [Director and Flash] different, that are good things to tap into? In other words, Director does this thing technically really well, and it makes a lot of sense to keep that as a solid differentiating factor; Flash does this thing really well, and it makes a lot of sense to keep that as a solid differentiating factor. So, we looked at those kinds of things and we saw that there are a couple of major [differentiators]. One is obviously, real-time 3D. Director [has] 60% ubiquity [with] the [Shockwave] plug-in, so you can get a 3D solution into a Web browser 60% of the time, which is leaps and bounds for real-time 3D beyond any other kind of solution that you can get. The other thing is the extensibility, being able to extend it at runtime [with Xtras] is another major factor. We're also finding as we continue to explore that another substantial contributor to Director's ongoing success is that it's a closed protocol. So that means that if you're deeply interested in making sure that it's highly unlikely that any kind of reverse engineering would happen to the application that you build, Director is a really solid and reasonable solution for that because you know the Shockwave stuff isn't out there, so it's not going to be the kind of thing that you see someone digging around under [the] hood.
KS: So Director 11 was announced back in February, it shipped in March, and after a long layoff — it's been four years — there have been a few months since the release. What kind of response are you seeing from the community [so far] and what are the new features that they're excited about?
AP: We're seeing a lot of positive action. One of the things that we're seeing is a lot of release of new content. There have been some wonderful developments with community organizations revving back up, starting to have lots of activities. We've had lots of contributions [from the community] in terms of people really contributing and saying, "here's what we're interested in, here's where we'd like to see the product go." There's just a tremendous amount of energy as people realize that now yes, absolutely, Adobe is moving forward with this platform. We're getting a lot of that kind of energy. We're also seeing some new pieces introduced — a lot of the new pieces, interestingly, are capitalizing on those key differentiators, so we're seeing a lot of activity in the serious games/immersive learning simulation space, in that educational offshoot where you're essentially talking 3D representations with physics, etc. You know, that's [a natural] response, because you've got a nice safe environment, you've got 60% market in the browser space, so it's a pretty powerful tool; in fact it's an incredibly powerful tool within that space. So companies like ForgeFX and Caspian Learning are really leveraging that whole serious serious games/immersive learning simulation space, and moving forward really quite rapidly.
Then the other thing I'm seeing a lot of is that the [massively multiplayer online games] seem to be just really taking off like crazy. For example, I spoke to Danny Lygonis of Playdo, and their first release in a while here is Spineworld. Very interesting piece, nice piece. Spineworld is a nice example, and it seems to have really rapid adoption; it's moving forward very very quickly. I imagine that a lot of them are seeing the success that an MMO like [Sulake] Habbo has had. The success is just astonishing — a recent blog post had them equal with or slightly greater than World of Warcraft for total numbers, so you're talking about really rapid growth. And then, of course, we've seen the same thing with Gene Endrody's Maid Marian. Habbo and Spineworld are more 2.5D kinds of solutions, whereas Maid Marian is more 3D, more what you'd expect from [an] immersive 3D space. Sociotown, Chris Evans, was featured in GameDev two months ago, [and it's] absolutely another interesting example in the whole MMO space. So we're seeing lots of good, positive action in those directions, directions that make good sense in terms of 3D and taking advantage of that.
KS: You mentioned extensibility — a quick one I wanted to ask was with the long delay between Director MX 2004 and Director 11, did you find any significant attrition in the number of Xtra developers out there who jumped ship because of the long delay?
AP: You know, that was one of the things I worked quite diligently on prior to the release, because we suspected that there might be some difficulties there. So one of the things we did is [we] made a really strong effort to contact all the Xtra developers, really include them on a sense of what our plans were, give them a sense of the entire picture we see for the product moving forward, and really encourage them to develop and develop early. I was very pleased with the results — a huge number of Xtra developers jumped on the bandwagon and got right back in. It's not surprising, because as you look at the Director community, what you find is that in a way, the community is its most sound asset, because the community is incredibly eager to contribute. They're incredibly active, they're incredibly helpful, and they're just incredibly zealous about the product. Director guys are Director guys, and they want to stay Director guys. So I saw a lot of that from the Xtra developers. You know, we have seen a couple of Xtras that have not yet been ported, and that's obviously the kind of thing we hate to see, but the bulk of the Xtras that we had identified as absolutely critical have moved forward. In fact, all the ones we had identified as absolutely critical have moved forward. There are a few interesting ones... You look at it two ways. You say, "OK, that Xtra is not moving forward," but you also say, "well, that's also a business opportunity for yet another person, where they could move forward and introduce their own solution."
KS: Not everyone's been around since the dawn of the multimedia age like us old-timers, so there may be some confusion out there about what Director is and what it does, and especially so in light of the other development environments like Flash and Flex and AIR being available and having somewhat of a larger profile in certain segments. What would you say to counter that sort of confusion about where Director sits, and perhaps give a sense of how Director fits into the Adobe lineup?
AP: Well, I think it helps people who haven't seen Director before to think of it as sort of an orchestration environment, that it's able to encompass virtually any media format. I know that when I talk to people about it it often seems to help them to understand that Director can actually play back Flash content, so you can bring Flash stuff into Director or Flash stuff into Shockwave and play back through those mechanisms, but you can't do it the other way around. I think that helps people understand that it's got this umbrella status, where its main purpose is to bring all [your] media together, and then direct it as you see fit to make your software. We're seeing growth in the game space, 3D space, and education space, and so I think if folks are looking in those three spaces, then Director is definitely an option for them. We like to say it's not a question of Director or Flash, it's a question of Director and Flash. And I think that's really true — I think in a solid multimedia arsenal today, you're probably finding that you're getting more and more requests for robust real-time 3D. And so if you want to do that, then the Flash/Director combo is killer, because you can use your Flash elements for the kinds of effects you want — for interface and other kinds of related things, and you can get lots of optimization on the vector end, and then at the same time, you can get those rich 3D worlds that you get in Director, and you can combine them all into one executable or into one Shockwave application online. It makes for a really nice combination.
KS: You know what, I think what is absolutely crucial and what has set Director apart — and continues to — is not only can you mock up everything in Flash, you can do all your whiz-bang Flash stuff that Flash is good for, but then once you bring it inside Director, and have all the OS integration and all the 3D and everything else Director gives you, being able to play that, self-contained, off of something like a CD ROM without having to install anything first is absolutely huge. You get calls for that sort of thing all the time, and [Director is] really one of the only [environments] that has that level of integration, where you don't have to install the AIR runtime, you don't have to install a browser plug-in, etc. It's one of those things that is absolutely huge, but is just sort of lurking in the shadows.
AP: Well, Director has always been a quiet product, right? I mean, even in the day, it was sort of a quiet phenomenon. People absolutely loved it, but it was the sort of thing you found out from a friend or buddy or pal, and I think that tradition is ongoing. One of the things we would like to see happen is we get more and more content out there, and more and more excitement around the Director platform, but we also see the sorts of things you're describing. We see a lot of folks using Director to wrap other kinds of content, and they may even have that content fairly well fleshed out in terms of its multimedia presentation, but they still turn to Director to get those deep hooks into the system and make sure they have complete control and can wrap it up with a nice little bow.
KS: Last thing — I have to ask, and I asked this of Tom Higgins when I interviewed him two years ago. For some, and I have to admit I'm guilty of this sort of thinking at times as well, it seemed plausible in the past that Director will eventually go the way of Authorware. So to the extent you can say, what is the future of Director? Is it going to continue to be developed? Do people have to worry about going another four years between releases? What's the thinking going ahead as far as Director's future is concerned?
AP: I can't give you specific information about release dates or schedules or anything like that, but I can tell you that we're moving ahead with engineering efforts. We've got a substantial team working on this thing, we are definitely in a forward-moving kind of a mode, and we see this as a fairly significant effort. Our mission ultimately is to put Director back into a leadership position in the multimedia industry. So we see this as a substantial effort that happens over a period of time, and obviously there needs to be events inside of that period of time that continue to grow and build the product. For example, we've already announced that in October we'll be releasing a patch for some of the issues that users identified in the 11 release. In fact, we had a hot patch out the door for 11 inside of a month, I believe. We're doing this patch in October for the next thing. There has been a significant shift in that arena, where substantial efforts are put into making sure that Shockwave and Director are constantly being tended to, and are on a continued development cycle. For example, last year, as we looked at Shockwave we knew that there was a lot of work to be done in terms of making sure that the plugin experience was as painless and effortless an experience for users as it possibly could be, and so there were a significant number of updates to that experience last year that, in the end, resulted in an experience for users which today we think is just really phenomenal. Essentially, when a new user comes in a typical situation to download Shockwave, they click yes on the golden bar, and once they've said, "OK, let's install the ActiveX," they get one prompt for the payload and that's it. The rest of it is just a silent install. So that experience is significantly improved, and obviously we think that users are really responding well to that.
KS: Well, it looks like we're out of time. Thanks a lot, Allen — this has been great. I love talking Director and seeing what's going on in the Director space. Thanks for taking the time to join me today.
AP: Hey, no problem!
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