Hi,
I've been following your site ever since the Ducky Builder contest (when are you going to release that game? :) and recently have seen you take an interest in Director/Flash....
I started using Director about a year and a half ago after using primarily VB... and I love it. I think you'll find that Director's programming language is actually pretty amazing... it's object oriented to the nth degree in the sense that just about anything can be done to anything with anything :) VB was very restrictive as to how you could use what... but my experience when coding lingo has been quite the opposite... the more I work with it, the more impressed I am.
I haven't worked as much with flash/actionscript. . . but honestly, I can't stand it... I've only done a little MX, most of my experience was with flash 5.... and the programming language felt *REALLY* "tacked on as an afterthought" -- which it really was. I think the more you work with Director, the more you'll like it... it was designed from the beginning with a programming language in mind (as opposed to flash, which was designed to let artists move shapes around the screen and keep them from the complicated programming stuff :) and you can really tell that the language (lingo -- no pun intended) has really gone through a lot of changes and is pretty solid.
I posted a comment on your site about how you can export your scripts in Director and then your source files are text based so you can zip them up once a week or use CVS or whatnot... I have a friend who has been working with Director since about v5 and I know he's had problems with big files dying sometime in the past... I haven't really had any problems.
Also, I wanted to let you know about a couple of things that you'll probably be very interested in. The first is the Director Game Developer mailing list, which you can sign up for here: http://nuttybar.drama.uga.edu/mailman/listinfo/dirgames-l/ (you can also search the archives through google if you type in your keywords and tag on "site:nuttybar.drama.uga.edu" on the end)
Anyway, I just wanted to drop a note and say, welcome to the wide world of Director. :) I think you'll like it.
Oh, and you've got to check out this guy's stuff:
http://www.setpixel.com/ -- I think once you start digging around, you'll find Director can do *ALL* kinds of amazing stuff that no one's really talking about, except in small circles. Another couple of great sites with very neat code and examples are: http://www.robotduck.com (he's got a ton of games he's written in Director that're all very unique) and http://www.evilfish.org -- it hasn't been updated in a while, but still has some great stuff. Also, the site I check on a regular basis is http://www.director-online.com/ where you can find all sorts of interesting tutorials about all sorts of things, games included...
Oh, also, I've found it very easy to convert from vb/c/c++ to Lingo... I imagine you will pretty quickly as well. I've converted over some particle systems, sort routines and that sort of thing... my most recent project is going through a DirectX 2 programming book (!) called Spells of Fury and converting the code over to Imaging Lingo... and it works really really well so far.
Here are a few links I think you'll find extremely interesting in regards to creating sprites dynamically...
Intro to Imaging Lingo: Part 1
http://www.director-online.com/accessArticle.cfm?id=851
Intro to Imaging Lingo: Part 2 (not as relevant to dynamically creating sprites, but still very useful/interesting stuff)
http://www.director-online.com/accessArticle.cfm?id=857
Sprite Magazine Object:
http://www.director-online.com/accessArticle.cfm?id=854
Take care,
Greg
http://www.unseenthings.com/
BTW, don't go to the Robotduck site unless you want to spend a lot of time there. He's got a couple of really great Flash games there. I'm hooked on Vampire Boy, and I am strangely entertained by dogstare.
