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The following describes a bug found in Shockwave version 8.5.1, build 106 for Windows and build 105 for Macintosh. The bug is not present in previous builds of the player.
For testing, you will require builds 102 and 106 of Shockwave, if you are using Windows, or builds 102 and 105 if you are using a Mac.
Download Shockwave offline installers >.
Descripton of the bug
The bug only affects shockwave when it is run locally, for instance as a hybrid website-on-a-CD.
According to the documentation, for security reasons, Shockwave cannot load any external files unless they are placed in a folder called dswmedia. However in build 106, you cannot load files from the hard drive, even if they are correctly placed in a dswmedia folder.
Macromedia releases a partial fix
Macromedia has a new technote describing this bug and a fix.
Macromedia Technote >
Important: Do not copy the Xtras into your Director Xtras folder as the instructions say to do in step 2: it will break Director. The bug only affects Shockwave, so you only need to copy the Xtras into the Shockwave net support folder, as described in step 3.
Also, despite what the technotes say about Shockwave installations automatically updating themselves, there are two problems you may encounter.
- Firstly, as yet, the standard download does not include the fixed Xtras. Therefore, if you do not select "auto update" during install, all new Shockwave downloads will still exhibit the bug.
- Secondly, exactly when auto-update takes place is not documented. It certainly does not occur immediately. Therefore, even if auto-update is enabled, you may still have to manually patch systems to get them to work immediately, or else wait an unspecified time for the patch to be applied automatically.
Demonstrating the bug
The demonstration concentrates on preloadNetThing. When further investigation has been completed we will document the full scope of the bug.
The demo movie attempts to preload a text file using preloadNetThing. When run from a webserver it works properly. When run locally with a pre-106 build, and run from a dswmedia folder, it works correctly. When run from the same local folder using build 106, it will fail.
The exact problem exhibited is that preloadNetThing never returns a netDone code. It does not even return an error with netError. It simply hangs, as netDone will always return zero.
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