Upgrading your MultiUser movies for Director 11

The MultiUser Xtra included with Director 11 and Shockwave 11 was upgraded to transmit and receive strings in Unicode (UTF8) format. While Nebulae 2 can handle these strings and transmit them correctly, it might be necessary to review your Director movies that use the MultiUser Xtra in order to make them behave correctly with the new functionality.

Several movies used the original Chat behaviors provided by Macromedia with earlier versions of the SMUS. These behaviors attempt to convert strings to/from MacRoman and Windows (Latin1) encoding, using Lingo functions named convertToMac, convertFromMac, convertToPC and convertFromPC. There are variations of this technique, but almost all existing Shockwave movies that use the MultiUser Xtra do some sort of conversion to handle the previous differences that existed in high ASCII characters (>127) on the two platforms. These scripts need to be disabled in Director 11 in order for strings to display correctly: in UTF8 strings there is no difference between text created on the Mac or on Windows. Attempting to do the conversion will corrupt the strings, and your movies will display incorrect characters when messages are sent from a Windows user to a Mac user, and vice-versa.

Notice that this is not a limitation or requirement of Nebulae, and it will also affect other scenarios where MUS code assumed string data was encoded was MacRoman or Latin strings.