Director player error xtras install#
Director player error xtras code#
Director player error xtras series#
Director player error xtras mac#
Director player error xtras windows#

This circumvents the issue of NPAPI being removed from browsers so the plugin cannot be used anymore.

Director player error xtras install#

It's possible to use Projectors to play Shockwave Movies without the need to install the Shockwave Player itself, instead providing them as standalone executables.

Director player error xtras windows#

Director still works on Windows 10, pretty well in fact. The good news is that having Shockwave emulation is not really greatly required, because.

Shockwave is capable of 3D rendering, and this has raised questions of whether or not this is within ScummVM's scope. It's also worth mentioning that ScummVM is only focused on 2D games. ScummVM would have to rewrite potentially hundreds of Xtras. It also ignores the third party Xtra ecosystem - many classic games used Xtras like the Beatnik Xtra or the 3D Groove Xtra. I consider this an unsatisfactory solution, because in later Director versions, I consider the ability to load real Xtras are a core, essential feature - so much of Director's functionality had been moved into Xtras, they're practically required to start the program.

Director player error xtras code#

Unfortunately, because ScummVM is cross-platform, the only way they could support Xtras is by 'faking it,' hardwiring their GUIDs to code in the main codebase, so it will never be entirely feature complete. Most Shockwave content uses Director 8 or later. However, Director 5 and later versions became increasingly dependent on Xtras over time. This is why ScummVM has been able to fairly accurately recreate a Director 4 player, although it's still not a trivial task as it involves supporting Director's Lingo programming language, which is itself fairly intricate. It's worth mentioning that Director 4 did not have any Xtras, and at this point in time everything Director required was in the single, core package. Director exports over 120 MOA interfaces (I've counted them in IDA,) most of them documented by the XDK, some of them undocumented, some with few methods, some with many. It's very similar to how COM interfaces work - in fact almost identical.

Director player error xtras series#

MOA is a series of interfaces Director provides so Xtras can communicate with it. In order to create an open source Director implementation, it would need to be capable of loading Xtras, and this would involve recreating MOA. One of the most common for example is Buddy API, which is a sort of 'swiss army knife' to polyfill common features Shockwave didn't support out of the box. There are at least 700 Xtras in existence. Shockwave is dependent on the ability to run native code for these platforms, because anyone could create Xtras to do anything they wanted, and they were very commonly used.

Director player error xtras mac#

The existence of Xtras effectively locks Shockwave to Windows and Mac only. Because it's extensible, an open source implementation would never be complete. There are first party Xtras by Macromedia/Adobe that are core, essential features of Shockwave that it depends upon to work, and it was also possible to create third party Xtras which allowed for any developer to add their own capabilities to Shockwave using the XDK (Xtra Development Kit.) This poses a problem because even if one were to rewrite every first and third party Xtra in existence to be open source, I could always just decide to create a new one.

The biggest obstacle to having an open source Director implementation is Xtras, and their underlying technology, MOA (short for Macromedia Open Architecture.) Shockwave could be extended to add more features by using Xtras which are compiled natively for the system. It's format has no official documentation.

In contrast, the Director API (Shockwave's underlying technology) was intended to be used to create complex and media rich applications, and is more advanced with many features. There is even official documentation for it. It eventually grew to be more robust with the features added by AS3, but in general, the Flash file format is fairly simple to understand. There are also less people who are interested in having such an emulator, or indeed even know that Shockwave and Flash are not the same thing.ДЇlash was originally intended primarily for animation and graphics purposes, and basic interactivity was only really added as an afterthought. However, Shockwave is a great deal more sophisticated than Flash is, so it would require more work than Ruffle to create such an emulator. The existence of emulators such as Ruffle for Flash has created a slight increase in demand for something similar for Shockwave. This really is not feasible (without way more work than it's worth,) but it also isn't greatly necessary.