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Although Macromedia Shockwave was designed for making a wide variety of online movies and animations, its actual use has become concentrated in the area of game development. Shockwave's 3D engine is still unchallenged in this market having replaced Java as the most popular engine for online games. Flash files can be played on a Shockwave player, but not vice versa. Other features not replicated by Flash include a much faster rendering engine, including hardware-accelerated 3D, direct pixel access on bitmap images, blend modes for layered display of graphic assets and support for various network protocols, including Internet Relay Chat . Furthermore Shockwave's functionality can be extended with so-called "Xtras". Unlike Flash, the Shockwave browser plugin is not available for Linux (or Solaris ) despite very vocal lobbying efforts by the Linux community. According to Macromedia.com , Macromedia Shockwave Player is available on 55.4% of Internet-enabled PCs ( Shockwave Player Census ). Macromedia Shockwave Player uses ''.DCR'' files created using the authoring tool , Generator, and a number of third-party tools such as OpenOffice.org and Swish . Its MIME type is ''application/x-shockwave-flash''. EXTERNAL LINKS
Shockwave and Flash definitions
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