TechNote (Archived)

External cast members are not appearing on the stage

Issue

Linked External Cast Members originally located in a subfolder do not appear during the playback of a Shockwave movie.

The following illustrations show what happens to linked cast members in a subfolder before and after publishing.

Before publishing

1. The project "myMovie.dir" below contains a subfolder named"casts."

2. Inside the "casts" folder is a file named "jpg.cst," which is an external cast file that contains media used by the "myMovie.dir" project.

Note:The cast file has the CST extension prior to publishing.

After Publishing

Note:In order to preview the Shockwave movie correctly on your local drive, the project files must be located in a "dswmedia" folder. Also note how the"jpgs.cct" was automatically created on the root level of the Shockwave project folder instead of being created inside the"casts" folder after publishing from Director.

Reason

If external cast files (CST) are located in a subfolder, Director will move the newly protected cast file (CCT) to the root level of the Shockwave project folder upon publishing, causing a "silent" (no error messages or dialog boxes) misreference to cast members that are in the external cast. During playback of the Shockwave movie, the viewer will not be able to see any media that should have been located in the External Cast subfolder. Keep in mind that, by default, Director always searches for files in their original location.

Solution

Move any CCT files from the root directory of the project back into their original subfolder. The Shockwave movie will now reference external casts correctly.

Note: Do not rename the CCT extension back to CST. Also, the DIR and CST files do not need to be uploaded to the Web server. Shockwave requires only the published HTML, DCR, and CCT files to run properly. When testing the Shockwave movie locally, be sure to place the movie inside a "dswmedia" folder. When running the Shockwave movie on a server, the dswmedia folder is no longer needed, but the directory structure of the project on the server must be identical to the directory structure of the project on the local drive.

Additional Information
For more information on the "dswmedia" folder please refer to Using dswmedia folders and the support folder (Director and Internet Security).