Shockwave was generated by Macromedia Director (the spiritual precursor to Flash) and had a lovely IDE with a fantastic debugger and excellent 3D, video and audio support. You could make "proper" games in it, I once hooked it up to some hardware tilt sensors to make a Joust clone you could play by flapping your arms.
The scripting language Lingo was a little bit gumby but perfectly serviceable. The main engine limitation was IIRC you could only have 256 sprite channels. I was always disappointed that Flash took hold instead of the more powerful Shockwave platform.
To this day when programming Ruby I always mistype "puts" as "put" thanks to Lingo still burned into my fingers.
Macromedia Flash and Macromedia Director were both powerful and interesting products.
I played around with Flash years ago, back when Flash was still “in vogue” — made a couple of animations and wrote a rudimentary graphics editor that I didn’t finish.
I have fond memories of playing Flash and Shockwave games in elementary and middle school. One Shockwave game in particular that I remember was a 3d car game where other cars were chasing you through a city. The gameplay was rather simple and the 3d was quite low poly but it was an impressive game nonetheless.
I also installed Director at some point I think but it was a bit too complicated for me to understand at the time.
I recently picked up a few books on Director and Lingo that the library at my university had decided to get rid of. Flash and Shockwave are dead but the editors had something to them that I think is worthy of investigation, thought and revival. Perhaps some day we can have a Flash/Director like tool for developing interactive Canvas and Canvas3d (WebGL) content.
Director had depth and power, while Flash was very accessible to illustrator/designer types. That era saw some amazing net.art demoscene type pieces that have no modern equivalent (Joshua Davis / flight404 etc). Haiku.ai is doing some interesting work in that space.
I wonder if WebAssembly can bring back this classic art aesthetic. The key is a great IDE with strong graphics asset management.
That's one of the goals in a discord I'm a part of. The concern is whether or not WebSockets is adequate enough for this too. There will likely be a need for JavaScript in any regard. It's interesting that Director did support JS in some form for a while too, but everyone always writes the decompilers for the Lingo syntax.
Still looking for an online Pictionary (tm) clone to play with my daughter. Used to play Isketch [1], it seems to still exist, but I don't have Shockwave installed so cannot verify.
The scripting language Lingo was a little bit gumby but perfectly serviceable. The main engine limitation was IIRC you could only have 256 sprite channels. I was always disappointed that Flash took hold instead of the more powerful Shockwave platform.
To this day when programming Ruby I always mistype "puts" as "put" thanks to Lingo still burned into my fingers.