Adobe Director

The successor of Macromedia Director, Adobe Director has been a reference authoring tool for creating 3D content for many years. Although it seems that Adobe has put its further development on hold, the application remains a full-featured program for professionals.

Especially designed for multimedia authors and game developers, Adobe Director provides users a complete set of tools for creating 2D and 3D multimedia projects and developing web and CD content using Shockwave.

It features a native scripting environment that you can use to author interactive games and multimedia applications, but for those who are not familiar with Lingo's functions and commands, Adobe Director provides full JavaScript support. The enhanced script browser and the code snippets are designed to help you easily learn about programming in Director.

The native 3D rendering support (DirectX 9), together with the advanced PhysX engine is designed to help you create complex tridimensional elements with real collision and gravity simulations. Also, it allows you to import ready-made 3D objects from Google SketchUp.

As expected from an Adobe product, it provides support for Flash content (Flash 9) and allows you to create Flash ActionScript objects.

Providing support for a variety of video, audio, and image file formats, the software also comes with advanced audio and video capabilities. Real-time mixing, HD and full-screen playback support, audio effects, media synchronization and DSP filters, to name some.

In addition to this, it comes with support for bitmap filters to apply effects to pictures, enhanced text rendering engine, as well as support for ByteArray data, which you can use to store text in any character set, including Unicode.

Once a benchmark product in the multimedia authoring industry, Adobe Director is now surpassed by its well-known competitor, Flash, which has become a great alternative for developing 3D projects.