Shockwave is a 3D animation format that is now being produced by Adobe Systems. The .dcr extension is used for Shockwave files, which are created using Adobe Director, and a Shockwave Player is used to play the files.
Adobe Shockwave was formerly known as Macromedia Shockwave. Before the release of Macromedia Flash, Shockwave used to be Macromedia’s most popular multimedia player that is used to create pdf . A plug-in for viewing Macromedia FreeHand files was also released by Macromedia, and it was called Macromedia Shockwave for FreeHand.
However, on 12 December, 2005, Macromedia’s primary rival Adobe Systems acquired the company in a stock swap. Thus, all of the successful Macromedia software products became Adobe products. Some of the popular rebranded products include Adobe Captivate, Adobe ColdFusion, Adobe Acrobat Connect (formerly Macromedia Breeze), Adobe Dreamweaver, Adobe Director, Adobe Fireworks, Adobe Flash, and Adobe Shockwave.
The Macromedia Director team members Christian Hunt and David Walker developed Shockwave as a helper application, which was intended for playing multimedia content on a web browser. Soon, an independent version of Shockwave (Version 1.0) was released. The Adobe Director environment is usually required to author Shockwave movies. Although Flash movies can be included inside a Shockwave file, a combination of Shockwave and Director is usually preferred for authoring, since it allows authors to utilize more powerful tools as well as features. These tools include a very powerful rendering engine, support for network protocols such as Internet Relay Chat, hardware accelerated 3D, and the utilization of several ‘Xtras’.
One of the most useful features of Adobe Shockwave is that it facilitates Adobe Director applications so that they can be viewed and published on the net. An Adobe Shockwave plug-in is all that is needed for the web browser to view the applications. Shockwave is available as a plug-in for both the Macintosh and Windows operating systems. However, it wasn’t supported for the Macintosh between 2006 and 2008, since it was not compatible with the Apple Intel transition operating systems. In late 2008, however, Adobe Shockwave 11 was developed especially for Intel Macs to create pdf files. While Flash plug-in is available for operating systems such as Linux and Solaris, a Shockwave plug-in isn’t available for these systems.
Initially, Shockwave was used primarily for developing animations or making online movies. Afterwards, it became a popular application for game developers, since it is ideal for representing rich graphical environments that are often used in modern games. Shockwave also finds its use in online learning, wherein tools such as graphing and charting are used to gauge objects and convert pdf in a simulated environment.
Shockwave has had a long history since its inception. In 1995, the Shockwave plug-in was made available for the Netscape Navigator web browser. In the following years, Shockwave 5 was released, integrating the Afterburner with Director 5.0. The Shockwave audio or ‘swa’ files were supported in the next version, which was Version 6. Shockwave 6 also featured the MP3 file format. Shockwave 8.5 began supporting Intel 3D technology while Shockwave 11 added support for Macintosh Intel systems. The latest version of Shockwave was released in March, 2009. The present version (11.5) addresses a few of the security and vulnerability issues too.