Shockwave 11 Implementation Tricky

Now that Shockwave 11 is around, people like me with lots of Shockwave content need to think about some things.
Shockwave 11 is so different than Shockwave 10 (new text rendering engine, new 3D physics Xtra) that Adobe has decided that they should co-exist, rather than 11 replacing 10. So consider these scenarios:

  • If a user has Shockwave 10, and they are viewing something made in Director 10 or before, then it runs in Shockwave 10.
  • If a user has Shockwave 10, but not 11, and they are viewing something made in Director 11, then they are told to install Shockwave 11, or it will auto-install with ActiveX in IE.
  • If a user has both Shockwave 10 and 11, then Shockwave 10 will be used to play Director 10 content, and Shockwave 11 will be used to play Director 11 content.
    Seems simple enough? Right. But that’s just for Windows users. For Mac users, it is a different story. (I have a Mac podcast, BTW).
  • Shockwave 10 is a PowerPC browser plug-in. It doesn’t work on Intel machines unless you set the browser to run in Rosetta mode. Director 10 content will play like it did before on PowerPC Macs.
  • Shockwave 11 is an Intel browser plug-in, it works only on Intel Macs. All Shockwave content, Director 10 and 11, will play back using the Shockwave 11 plug-in.
    So, if we discount PowerPC Mac users as just being able to play Director 11 content, then the problem is just that Intel Mac users will be looking at old content using the new engine.
    This breaks things.
    I’ve got a few games where the text doesn’t look or work right under Shockwave 11.
    I’ve got a few games where the old physics engine is used, which means Mac Intel users just get an error message.
    So this is why I’m less-than-thrilled about Shockwave 11. I’d imagine it will be a few months from now that I get around to making all my content Shockwave 11 compatible, by fixing text bugs and switching to the new physics engine. But even then I’ll still want to have some way for PowerPC users to continue to use the Director 10 versions of the games.
    • Posted on April 14, 2008 at 1:34 pm by Gary Rosenzweig · Permalink
    In: General

    3 Responses

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    1. Written by Rob
      on 4/16/2008 at 3:23 am
      Permalink

      Uhm, Shockwave 11 is not just for Intel. It’s available for PPC as well…

      However, SW11 for Macs doesn’t have the compability mode that the Windows plug-in has so Macs will use the new SW11 engine to play old (pre 11) content as well. This will make more things break on Macs than on Windows.

      The D11 white paper has a section about how the compability mode works: http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb403195

    2. Written by alex
      on 4/17/2008 at 2:20 am
      Permalink

      Given the fact, that the software architecture for OSX changed and executables need to be at least recompiled, which requires the source of the xtra, I think, that the solution we have now is the best what I can figure.
      Sure I would like to have an UB version of havok and some other xtras, but I think that Adobe also would want that.
      What solution would you propose instead?
      I for one appreciate the effort which has been made to get the best solution for windows and to get the UB version for mactel as far as possible.
      Sure enough the text engine change is not exactly optimal, but especially on mac and using 3-D I trade that for the performance boost compared to sw10 running in rosetta.

    3. Written by holdenman
      on 10/12/2008 at 10:38 pm
      Permalink

      ridiculous cant even download shockwave 11 just says IE has stopped working now cant play any shockwave games at all

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