Director

director
Engine developer	sev, iskrich, djsrv, npjg
Companies that used it	Macromedia
Games that use it	hundreds of games
Date added to ScummVM	2016-08-04
First release containing it	Since ScummVM 2.5.0

The Macromedia Director engine was partially implemented by iskrich for the Google Summer of Code in 2016 and was further implemented by the Google Summer of Code students djsrv and npjg in 2020 and the Google Summer of Code students djsrv and sheep in 2021.

Introduction

Started out as MacroMind VideoWorks. MacroMind was founded by Marc Canter. The name VideoWorks was changed to Director in 1987.

Director underwent huge number of versions.

History of the engine.

A bit more history of the engine codenames

Games and software targeted by the engine

This engine potentially targets a very large amount of games:

See Director Games for a list of known games and software, and their current state of support in the engine.

Versions

The Director player was the basis for the Macromedia Shockwave web plugin. Shockwave 1.0 was based on Director 4.0. The next release was Shockwave 5.0, based on Director 5.0, and from then on Shockwave's version number was tied to Director.

In Japan at least D4+ was released under title マクロメディア ディレクター

File Format

Archive Team's documentation

• Shockwave (Director)
• Lingo bytecode

Team Earthquake's documentation

• A Tour of the Adobe Director File Format
• Team Earthquake Shockwave Unofficial Documentation
• More Director Movie File Unofficial Documentation (has in-depth documentation of structs)
• OpenShockwave repo (rather unorganized documentation and tools including a Lingo decompiler)
• Earthquake Project repos (newer versions of the above)

Development and Running

Running any D3 or D4 mac target

Besides adding specific md5s, there is a shortcut for forcing a directory to be detected as a director game.

Create an empty file named "D3-mac" or "D4-mac" in the game directory, and it will be detected as the respective Director version

Starting from an arbitrary movie file

Assuming, that you added game named 'workshop' with the method above.

./scummvm --start-movie=HandV workshop

Here HandV is the name of a movie in the directory. A frame number to start execution can also be added:

./scummvm --start-movie=HandV@2 workshop

Executing lingo tests

Point ScummVM to engines/director/lingo/tests, that will create target 'directortest'. Launching it will try to compile and execute all *.lingo files in that directory. The tests can also be run from the command line with:

./scummvm -d11 -p engines/director/lingo/tests/ directortest

The option --start-movie=<script_name> is also available to run a specific .lingo file.

Executing all director movies in a directory

Assuming you want to run all director movies in a given director. Create an empty file called 'lingotests-all' in that directory. Point ScummVM to that directory and add it as a game. That will run all director files in that directory. This can also be run from the commandline with:

./scummvm directortest-all-mac

Debug flags

There is a number of debugflags which could be turned on. The up-to-date list could be found in director.cpp in the DirectorEngine class constructor. You turn the flags with --debugflags=<flag>,<flag>. Please, denote, that messages are often stored at several levels, so add with something like debug level 5, e.g. -d5. Example:

 ./scummvm --debugflags=lingoexec,lingocompile,slow -d6 --start-movie=TABLE.DIR chopsuey

The useful ones are:

• lingoexec -- tracing Lingo execution
• lingocompile -- details about Lingo script compilation
• lingoparse -- turns on Bison grammar trace. Verbose. You should know what you're doing
• compileonly -- useful with test targets when we load all files in the directory. This is how we created that status table of Lingo Workshop movies
• slow -- add 2s delay between every frame. Useful at higher debug levels, so you could see what is going on instead of munching megabytes of logs
• fast -- removes delay between frames
• bytecode -- execute precompiled bytecode instead of compiling Lingo. Lingo Workshop movies have both bytecode and script texts
• loading -- produces tons of deciphered data from movie files.

Automated Tests

There is a CI (continuous integration) server running for Director.

• Buildbot server
• Buildbot server sourcecode

Is my game a Director Game and which version is it?

Run the following command in the directory of your installed gamedata:

 grep --text -ir director|strings |egrep 'Macromedia Director [0-9]'

This will show which version of Macromedia Director was used. If this yields nothing, it probably isn't a Macromedia director game.

Debugger Commands

To open the interactive debugger console press the key combination that is set for "Open Debugger" in the "Keymaps" tab from ScummVM options (default should be Ctrl+Alt+d).

lingo

Opens a lingo language shell.

) lingo on
lingo) set a to "Hello ScummVM"
lingo) put a
-- "Hello ScummVM
lingo) lingo off
)

Arguments:

• lingo on - Start the interactive lingo shell
• lingo off - Stop the interactive lingo shell

When the shell is on when the line starts with `lingo) `.

External Links

• fuzzie's work in Python
• Early work by fuzzie/clone2727
• another clone of it
• Wikipedia article on the topic
• Do You Speak the Lingo? - blog post by Misty De Meo about the ScummVM engine's development