Software - The Shockwave Revolution Online Casinos Apr 29, 2001, 13:32 By Steve "Eagle Eye" Walker http://www.gamblingonlinemagazine.com

In a continuous effort to reach more people, software developers are always looking at new technologies, and how they can use their customer base.  One of these new technologies is Shockwave.
Over the last 6 months, there have been dozens of new online casinos and bingo games that have embraced Shockwave as their development and delivery tool.

Shockwave is a part of the Macromedia Director product, which, in its eighth version, is now quite mature.  The environment takes care of many of the tedious tasks that programmers face in creating animation rich applications, such as drawing graphics, timing the animation, and scheduling sounds to be played at the right times.  It has tools to create compact graphics, and provides support for the networking necessary to produce an online game of chance.

There are many benefits, both for the player and the online casino developer, in Shockwave sites.  Unfortunately, there are also some less than desirable qualities, but individual preferences will vary.

One of the biggest advantages of Shockwave is that it is a relatively easy environment in which to develop.  What that means to the player is that new games can be introduced frequently, and in the future, I believe that you may start to see newer games earlier in the Shockwave casinos than their downloadable and Java based counterparts.

Another advantage of Shockwave is that it is compatible with all of the major browsers and works on both PC's and Macs.  In many cases, the Macintosh Shockwave compatibility is better than the Java compatibility, but your results may vary according to the version of Mac OS and browser you have installed.

Shockwave sites often have faster start up times than other types of non-downloadable software.  This is because the engine that displays the graphics is already downloaded onto your machine (providing that you have already installed the Shockwave player, or it came pre-installed on your machine), and the only thing that needs to be downloaded is the graphics, sounds, and game logic.

The display engine that drives Shockwave sites is scalable.  What that means to you is that no matter how big or small your screen is, the Shockwave program can fill the entire screen by making the playing area larger.  You won't ever have to look at tiny cards or dice again in a Shockwave game, since you can just make the window larger.  Of course, the problem here is that when the graphics start getting large, you will notice that the details suffer.

Unfortunately, for all these benefits, there are also some drawbacks to Shockwave sites.  As I have discussed in a previous article about download vs. downloadablead games, Shockwave games do take longer to start up than downloadable games, since the graphics need to reload from the web site each time.

Also, if you use your browser's back button to go to a previous web page, many of the Shockwave games will lose the connection and you will have to login in again.  Due to the way that Shockwave stores and draws its graphics (called vector based), the graphics in Shockwave games are often less detailed than in downloadable games.  While these vector graphics scale efficiently to larger (or smaller) sizes, they generally suffer visually by not offeringthe crisp look that traditional (bit mapped) graphics offer, even when the Shockwave program is played at its normal, intended size.

Another problem with Shockwave sites is that the Macromedia engine that drives the software is frequently updated.  While that is a good way to keep bugs to a minimum, and provides developers and users great new features, it means that users must often download a new version of the Shockwave player. This download generally requires a reboot.

A note for Macintosh users after you install the Shockwave player, increase the memory participation for your browser.  You'll find that the additional memory allocated to the browser will help the stability of your system.  To set the memory partition, find the icon for your webbrowser, and select get info...from the file menu.  System 8 users will find the memory partition right there, while System 9 and above users will find it in the memory section.

All in all, Shockwave games are a viable alternative to todays download and Java games.  There are vast differences in quality between the products on the market, but if you are looking for something new, give one a try.  For some eexamples check out some of the 63 sites listed at Gambling.com