Andrew M. Phelps

Recently in a Shockwave3D project, I had some problems with the modelsUnderRay command. More precisely, modelsUnderRay seemed to have some problems of its own. Occasionally it just didn't give the correct result, it would miss a model somehow. In the particular application I was building (a landscape that let the user's drive a car around on the surface), this was dramatic because the when modelsUnderRay failed, the car fell through the world. At first I started to develop little stop-gap bits of code that ensured that the built-in functions would work. And then it occurred to me, why not just write my own? So in my application, I was firing a ray 'down' from the position of the car, and intersecting the land, and then moving the car 'up' so that it would ride on the surface. I was also orienting the car to the normal of the triangle that it was on top of. This is ... (more)

And My Magic 8-Ball Says...

Director has three things going for it that are unique in both the Macromedia and Adobe product lines: Imaging Lingo (or JavaScript), Shockwave 3D, and DVD support It's the middle of summer, and it's particularly hot this year. I suppose the same could be said of multimedia content tools. I've seen a ton of new products this year, each of which looks interesting in its own way. In prepping for this issue, our editor-in-chief asked each of us to do the impossible: predict where our products will be going given the merger of Adobe and Macromedia. Well, let me be the first to tell ... (more)

Using Multiple Cameras

Shockwave3D (S3D), despite a number of advantages such as delivery on the Web and small plug-in size, suffers from a few disadvantages in terms of its architecture. One of the "classic problems" with regard to the way S3D is built is the inability of the developer to manipulate exactly when objects are drawn to the screen, or more correctly the order in which they are drawn to the screen. This is in contrast to almost any traditional C or C++ graphics engine on the market today, which since they are written directly against DirectX or OpenGL can simply order the calls to the vari... (more)

Greetings, Faith, Reviews, and Seafood

Hello! I wanted to wait and formally greet you from the Macromedia MAX Conference in New Orleans. Some of you might know me from my writing at Director-Online, or from the Macromedia DevNet Center. Others are probably reading this and saying to themselves "Hey... wait a minute... where's James..." In any event, I wanted to report on the conference, give you a taste of what happened in case you weren't there, and finish up by talking a little about what I'd like to see as the new editor of this section. The MAX crowd this year was a split crew: there were a lot of Flash developer... (more)

Visual Debugging Tools for Shockwave

Recently, I have been working in Shockwave3D in Lingo and JavaScript syntax. Regardless of what I am writing, I keep running into issues that can be summed up by the following phrase: I don't know exactly what I'm doing. More precisely, I don't know exactly what I am doing when I am doing it. I'm figuring it out. And that's what programming interactive things is all about: finding a way to do what you need to do, such that the user has the experience you want them to have. Unfortunately it is sometimes difficult to tell exactly what your code is doing, and this is particularly tr... (more)