March 23rd 2001 | Jens C Brynildsen

ShockWave 8.5 released

The beta has been available for some time, but at UCON today Macromedia announced the official release of Flash's updated Big Brother.

From a Flash perspective, Shockwave 8.5 (SW8.5) adds little new, except for support for the Flash 5 format. The big news is in form of a alliance with microprocessor vendor Intel. MM and Intel have developed a 3D engine within the new version. The beta was showcased at the FlashForward 2001 conference in San Francisco earlier this year, and the final release is naturally even better than this. During the demo, a remake of one of the levels in Quake (by ID Software) was shown with amazing rendering speed and detail.

SW 8.5 will really shine if you have one of the newer 3D graphics cards, but the Software-mode really sucks performance wise. SW 8.5 is part of the Director SW 8.5 Studio package.

Look forward to huge amounts of great looking 3D games on the web from now on!
Read more about SW 8.5

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