Lewis Francis

• NewMedia Invision Awards (Gold Award, Award of Excellence, Best of Show)
• International Winter Consumer Electronics Show (Innovations '96 Award Winner)
• Macromedia UCON People's Choice (Gold Medal: Education)
• New York Festivals:International Competition for Interactive Multimedia (Gold Medal: Social Studies)
• MacWorld (Top 10 CDs of the Year)
• Family Channel and USA Today (Seal of Quality)

Project was targeted for 8-bit displays but the Mac version of Director 4 allowed higher color-depths, which along with the Mac's higher CD-ROM throughput made the video experience much better for those users (interestingly, the Peoples Choice award was based on the PC version of the CD on display at the UCON). Custom 8-bit Superpalettes were created with Debabelizer for each section.

XObjects: A custom database and xObject/DLL was created in-house to allow searching the list of soldiers who are memorialized on the Wall. PrintOMatic was used to print out search results and Wall panel placement. The Mac version used a cool xObject called GammaFade that allowed fade-to/from-black effects on 16 and 32-bit machines by fading gamma tables. Additional xObject/DLLs were used to fix QT/palette conflicts, detect the version of QuickTime, the presence of virtual memory, and to handle various file management tasks (for the handling of retrieved database records).

The cross-platform multimedia CD-ROM development solutions developed in this project were to be used on all subsequent titles, specifically the Launcher Strategy, environmental adaptation and video encoding standards.

• Software and Information Industry Association, 1997(Codie Award: Best World Wide Web Site )
• Family Channel and USA Today, 1996 (Seal of Quality)
• Internet Professional Publishers' Association, 1996 (Award for Design Excellence)

1000 page site at launch. Content modules showcased richmedia content. Database managed and scheduled content. Site search with relevancy ranking. Custom content management tools, Real audio streams.

An acknowledged leader in it's own field, the client needed help in mapping it's high standards and experience into the new world of online media; driving research into what was possible and practical with web and streaming media technologies of the day. The first drafts of what became the Magnet Interactive Styleguide and Technical Reference documents were a result of this research.

The launch showcase content module, "Silver Bank", featured a virtual walk-through of the Spanish galleon Concepción. To ship illustrations designed by Chuck Carter of Myst fame, we added streaming audio sound effects of sea waves and creaking timbers. To provide a seamless CD-ROM-like experience, I used a Real Audio plug-in instance placed in a hidden frame persisting throughout the walk-through. Users who had the plug-in enjoyed a true multimedia experience, even across a low-bandwidth connection.

Silver Bank also featured a treasure hunt game where visitors searched for coins hidden among the pages of the content module. Users who found all five coins and had registered were eligible for a drawing to win one of five actual coins recovered from the wreck of the Concepción. The game and registration was implemented in cgi with Python.

• INTERCOM, July 2000 (Silver Plaque: Interactive Multimedia - Web Sites)
• Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, April 2000 (Finalist: Online Game of the Year)

To accomplish the stated goal, we designed a site with multiple levels of graceful degradation, including plugin detection and fail-back in both Javascript/VBScript and Director plus a cookie-based method of storing the users bandwidth and Flash viewing preferences. Pages were dynamically written out to display either broadband Flash, dial-up Flash, or HTML for the site interface and content, and Shockwave for the Survey and Multiuser games. Back-end tools were built to handle authentication, contestant eligibility (COPPA compliance) and to manage and deliver the rotating sets of questions, answers, and scores from our database.

The Shockwave 6 based Survey collected pop culture question answer data for later use in the Pop-Trivia game, had a Flash Asset based interface matching the Flash 3 based web site option, and included login and a remote-fed Privacy Policy content for easy updating.

The Shockwave 7 Pop-Trivia multiuser game included all this plus MU functionality in the "Lounge", where users could fill out surveys while waiting for other contestants to login, and the "Studio", where the actual gameplay took place. Additionally, the Pop-Trivia game needed conditional testing to detect whether the game was playing in a browser or from within Shockmachine; if the latter, custom network detection and error handling was activated.

During development, an issue arose when AOL changed their proxy system preventing PC AOL users from playing the game (and AOL users from downloading Shockwave). With PC AOL 4 or 5 and Shockwave 7.x, getNetText requests to our back-end failed with a 4152 error if the returned data was greater than 1024 characters. After much testing and experimentation, I found that if the query string itself was greater than or equal to 256 chars, then our data could be returned as expected. To work around this issue, we first tested a known file of 1026 characters and if it returned a 4152, we padded out the query string and requested our actual data. This allowed a workaround that could be skipped when AOL fixed their problem and wouldn't affect other systems.