Macromedia Director Developers:
We Welcome Your Shock-Bauble Creations!

  • If you're creative (of course you are!),
  • if you believe that the rapid widespread adoption of the Shockwave Plug-In is in our best interests (of course it is!),
  • if you have a talent for squeezing the most fun, interactivity, and beauty into the smallest possible file size (no problem - Right?),
  • we would heartily welcome your submissions for inclusion in this site!

We'll give your creation its own page here on our site (we'd love to have you design the page if you care to), we'll link that page to your site, we'll give you full credit and attribution, we'll describe your work glowingly.

In order to have your work considered for inclusion as a real, honest-to-goodness "Shock-Bauble" , it must meet a few basic criteria:

  • It must be YOUR work. You must have full ownership, creative rights, etc. to what you submit -- absolutely no third-party submissions.
  • It must be an Afterburned .DCR file of 12k or smaller in size -- the smaller, the better.
  • It must be offered as the @dver@ctive Shock-Baubles are offered, absolutely free with only a few, very reasonable restrictions on usage or distribution. The primary restriction being that your work may not be sold or offered commercially by anyone other than you, the creator.
  • It must be available for download directly from our site -- our hope is to create a central depository of these cute little multimedia files.
  • It should be either attractive, interactive, amusing, or all three. We want folks to stick these Shock-Baubles on pages all over the world!

If you're up to this challenge, please see our Submission Instructions (pretty simple) so that we can work together to promote and spread your work in a most efficient manner. Thanks!

A Few Tips for Shock-Bauble Creation

You probably already know all of this . . . . . but for budding Macromedia Director prodigies, here are a few things we try to remember in creating small, tight Shock-Baubles:
  1. Lingo is King! Even long segments of Lingo text compress beautifully with Afterburner.
  2. One-Bit Color and Shape Cast members are your Aces-In-The-Hole. One or two small 8-bit cast members may be tolerable if you are going to keep your production under 12k, but do as much as you can with 1-bit colored casts and Shapes from the Tools window.
  3. Ink effects can give you some neat looks and surprising effects -- use them to be artistic.
  4. Parents and Kids are the way to make lots of things move on-stage at the same time in a fairly effortless manner. There's a fairly steep learning curve to the Lingo of Parents/Children (particularly if you only use MM's docs), but it is worth climbing the hill for the things you can do.
  5. Use the standard Mac palette or the standard Windows palette. Macromedia and Netscape are still working out some issues on custom palettes and the results can be shockingly bad on certain machine/color configurations. We (at @dver@ctive) have found the standard Mac palette to be the most reliable in its display on different machines; so we use it if at all possible.
  6. Don't stick any important Lingo in the first frame of your production, it is sometimes missed on loading.
  7. Don't tie up the processor with excessively long lingo repeat loops that shut out the other things on the machine (i.e. Netscape, the main processor, the operating system). We like to do multiple frame loops (i.e. go the frame -10 where all ten frames use the same frame handler rather than simply go the frame) and have found that it works suitably.
  8. If you are down to squeezing that last K out (say you are at 13K and want to make our 12K limit), here are a couple of tricks that usually work for us:
    1. If you don't specify your own font map, Afterburner includes Director's default map in its burn. Often, you are doing a pure animation that doesn't even have a font! So . . . make a near empty text file (i.e. two dashes in it), go to "Movie Info" in Director, specify this text file as your font mapping table. This will take 1.5k to 2k out of the final burned DCR!!
    2. Even when you save and compact a file, Director files pick up strange baggage and are not quite as small as they can be. This is particularly the case when you have added and deleted a lot of different cast members. We always do one thing -- save the file under a different name at the very end of the project -- that seems to help compact things. When we believe that a file has really picked up a lot of wasted baggage, we sometimes do a second thing -- copy the contents of our Director file into a brand new file using two steps. Step one is to move all of the cast members together starting at #1 in the cast with no gaps and copy the whole cast to the fresh new movie; we then save the new movie. Step #2 is to then copy the whole score from the original movie to the new movie. Our actual results with this copy-and-paste method vary greatly, but we've seen 44K .DIR files magically transformed into 26K .DIR files using this method with a similar drop of 30-40% in the size of the final .DCR!!