Before getting to the actual details of Shockwave, you need some information about multimedia and the Internet. Here's what to expect in this chapter:
A good roller coaster moves fast, goes high, and has lots of unexpected twists and hills. After a while, all the rides seem to be the same because they can't get bigger or faster or higher for safety reasons. What did the roller coaster creators do to distinguish the latest and greatest "Bloody Devil III" from the boring old "Fire Bomber"? They couldn't do much more with motion, so they added flashing lights and dark tunnels. Then they added music and screaming sound effects. Then they added water guns to spray the riders. Soon globs of blue slime ooze from the hand rails. The roller coasters affect the riders' senses through movement, but also through sight, sound, and touch.
Amusement parks aren't the only place where this has happened. Students don't write many papers anymore; they do presentations. Though writing still has a very important place in education, it can be limiting to certain people. By adding pictures, a whole new spectrum is added for individuals who learn better by seeing rather than reading. Presenting the information orally benefits those people who learn through listening. Adding tangibleobjects, sounds, video, diagrams, interaction, and other elements ensures that the presentation reaches every possible audience with the greatest impact.
This is true in business. Meetings may have overhead projectors, slides, video, computers, physical objects, and so on. By reaching more than one sense (sight, sound, touch, and so on), the presenter is sure that he or she is most effectively reaching the audience and holding its attention.
Of course, the driving force behind many of these enhancements is theadvancement of technology-more options available to more people for less money. The point here is that technology has expanded our communication and experiences to reach more than one sense simultaneously. Instead of choosing to read, listen, or see, we have the option of doing all three at once. The buzzword referring to this is "multimedia."
Multimedia in the computer sense most often refers to the development of the CD-ROM. A "multimedia computer" will have a CD-ROM player, sound card and speakers, and a color video display. The CD-ROMs often containaudio, video, pictures, text, and other elements that can be experienced.However, the computer has taken multimedia further than television or other presentation devices. It has made a very powerful addition: interactivity. By making software interactive, the user can make choices that affect the presentation. Instead of waiting through a series of videos, pictures, or text, the user can choose what to view. He or she can make decisions that affect how the information is presented. The multimedia viewer enters a completely dif-ferent world that they control and experience.
The Internet originally had very limited capabilities. Most computer terminals could display text in one color and had very little to offer in terms of graphics. However, the Internet has exploded in popularity and with itsexpansion has come technological developments to reach multiple senses over the vast network.
It wasn't that long ago that all one could expect from a Web page was a graphic here and there and a lot of text (see figure 1.1). I remember when it was a big deal when you could actually wrap text around an image! Within the past year, all this has changed even more dramatically than merely being able to flow text where you want it. It is now not an uncommon thing to run across multimedia Web pages-pages that have not only imagery but imagery with animation and audio (see figure 1.2). Suddenly, it isn't enough to know just HTML, the language of the Web. HTML programmers and designers are now required to know and be familiar with the wide array of new technologies that set their Web pages apart from the rest.
Figure 1.1 : A standard Web site may use only text to convey information.
The most popular way to add extra functionality to any Web site is through Shockwave. Introduced less than a year ago, Shockwave is responsible for almost single-handedly transforming the Internet from a text based infor- mation retrieval mechanism to a legitimate, full-fledged entertainment and advertising machine. Imagine having the whole world as your audience! Many have, and as the number of people with access to the Internet grows at an exponential rate, so do the number of companies wanting to take advantage of this untapped market.
How does one create a site that makes people want to visit and, more importantly, makes them want to come back? The answer: Shockwave. With it, a visitor to your site can be greeted with a spinning banner accompanied by music and animated text. When the user moves the mouse around the page, he or she can find user-triggered events to draw their attention to specific points of interest. Almost anything one can dream up is now possible, and those willing to take the time to use this new tool effectively will be creating sites that keep people coming back for more.
Shockwave in itself is not the tool that creates multimedia content but rather it is the means by which that content is delivered to Web browsers. Shockwave compromises two components. One is the Shockwave plug-in, available at the time of this writing only for a few browsers, Netscape Navigator being the most popular. The other component is a utility called Afterburner.
The Shockwave plug-in, once installed, plays multimedia files in a Web browser such as Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer. The HTML for inserting the files into a Web page is a simple addition. The files must be created using Macromedia Director, which is a popular multimedia authoring tool. Once a Director movie is created, you will be the proudcreator of a "Shocked" Web site in minutes!
The other half of Shockwave is a small program called Afterburner. Afterburner compresses Director movies at a ratio of greater than 2:1. It willcompress both .DIR and .DXR Director movies to a format with the .DCRextension. This is a compressed Director movie that is then ready to be placed on any Web server along with the accompanying HTML documents. The compression process itself takes a few seconds, and as mentioned before, the HTML from there on out is quite simple.
For an in depth discussion on how to "Shock" a Web page,
see chapter 3, "Putting It on the Web."
| Note |
It's important to realize that Shockwave is not a single software package that adds multimedia to the Web. It's a conversion process. The multimedia (motion, sound, and so on) is created in another software package, then can be viewed over the Internet using Shockwave as sort of a bridge. To create the multimedia files, you will need Macromedia Director, or a few other software packages as discussed in chapter 2, "Suggested Tools." |
Thus far we have been referring to Shockwave for Director, but there are also several other applications that can be involved. Shockwave for Director is the most common form of multimedia over the Internet, but for Intranets and complex multimedia projects, you may also use Shockwave for Authorware. Intranets (as opposed to the Internet) are smaller, closed networks that large companies use to link computers in a restricted region. Because most Intranets use faster connections, Shockwave for Authorware can use much larger, more detailed multimedia files.
A third form of Shockwave is Freehand, a vector graphics program. It allows the user to scale and pan a detailed image over the Web. Certain areas can also be defined as clickable links to other Web pages.
Chapter 17, "Alternatives to Shockwave," covers animated GIFs, Java, Real Audio, and movie file formats. There are various other ways to add advanced interactive multimedia to Web sites. If you are a C++ programmer for example, you can do advanced rollover functions and so forth in JAVA. However, if you are like the vast majority of HTML programmers, learning the C++ programming language just to make a button highlight when your cursor moves over it is not worth the months of programming and debugging that will invariably result when coupled with JAVA's learning curve. You could write a CGI script to perform a few simple functions, but each one would require a new HTML document to be loaded to see the result; and then, there is no way to include audio. Needless to say, most Web page creators don't know anything about Perl or CGI, let alone JAVA or C++ and probably prefer to keep it that way.
Creating a "Shocked" site is much easier to do than the alternative. A graphics background and a familiarity with various graphics packages are all that is necessary to create the components that will be part of a Director movie.
However, the key to creating good Shockwave Director movies is being able to create effective movies that are as small as possible to minimize download time. A Director movie doesn't run as soon as a Web page is loaded. The entire movie loads and starts to run anywhere from a few seconds to three or four minutes (for a very large movie) after the HTML document has loaded. At that point, it behaves normally, with no pauses or additional wait times. The fact of the matter is that the average user is using a 14.4 modem. Even with a 28.8 modem, a movie that is 200K takes about 180 seconds to download.
Of course, there are other factors that can decrease performance even further such as Network congestion or, to a limited extent, the speed of the server you are currently downloading data from. The good news is that most movies aren't 200K in size and that there are ways to keep them from getting out of control, as discussed in chapter 4, "Considerations for the Internet."
It's amazing to see what people can do given certain limitations. People who make crafts, for example, are incredible at this. They can take a soup can, some string, a bottle cap, and a few tooth picks and transform them into a scale model of the Battle of Lexington and Concord.
Shockwave and the Internet in general contain many limitations, discussed further in chapters 4 and 5, "Limitations of Shockwave and the Web," and throughout the book. The main limitation is file size, but beware of cynicism! You might think that sub-200K files can never amount to anything great, but you will soon learn to work within the limitations to produce some excellent movies for the Internet.
I often compare some of the Shockwave games to the old Atari 2600 games-choppy, humble graphics, limited sound, fairly simple in design. Now, years later, Shockwave is new and exciting and people don't compare it to CD-ROMs or other software. This is a new development for the Internet and it will remain exciting as long as people work with it and make progress in putting interactive media on the Web.
This book cannot possibly cover everything with Shockwave, and it is not intended to. It shows you the basics, as well as tips and techniques, and gives you a broad background from which you can develop your own work. The best way to learn tricks and stimulate ideas is to get out there and start checking out some Shockwave sites. Go to Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) or another Web-searching site and uncover as many Shockwave locations as you can. You will constantly be finding things that amaze you and teach you to look past limitations for new creative solutions.
The next few chapters get you started with Shockwave. The learning curve in creating Shockwave movies begins fairly easily. However, the potential for more advanced applications is limitless.