Alternatives to Director

With the release of Director 11, the "doom and gloom" crowd has been prodded awake, and the mailing lists are awash with people unhappy with Adobe about the recent release. The new physics engine is causing concerns, and there are reports of awful artifacting in text rendering.

So despite spending a lot of time on a Director-only list, these people are talking about alternatives to Director development. Here are some of the ones that are being suggested.

• jMonkeyEngine is an open source 3D Java gaming engine. I had trouble launching applications in it, but apparently, it's being used to create some MMO-ish and other games, including Bang! Howdy.


• Project Darkstar is Sun's gift to MMO developers, an open source SMUS replacement that is scalable.


• Unity is still getting a lot of attention by this crowd as a powerful alternative, and it has proven its chops with games like GooBall. This seems to be where the people who are jumping are jumping the most. There is a lot of anxious hand-wringing from the Windows crowd about how the IDE is only available for Mac, of course, but, well, I have little sympathy.