Chapter 15: Publishing; Testing And Debugging Environments - Adobe ATMOSPHERE User Manual

ADOBE ATMOSPHERE 195
User Guide

Chapter 15: Publishing

Publishing an environment is one of the fi nal steps to make your environment visible online. The process of
publishing will bundle all of the fi les that make up your world–geometry, texture, light maps, sound, video and
scripts–into a single, remarkably compact AER fi le ready for a web page or PDF fi le. Once published, the entire world
will be able to see you creation, but they won't be able to open and "borrow" any of its components.

Testing and Debugging Environments

It would be a pity, after all your hard work, if your Atmosphere environment didn't behave as planned. To make sure
your users won't be disappointed, it's a good idea to test your environment before you release it.
Locating Errors
Experienced Atmosphere developers are familiar with some of the bugs that are common to online 3-D worlds, and
make a point of checking for them. Atmosphere is perhaps the easiest-to-use 3-D package ever, but 3-D worlds are
complex places, and bugs have a way of sneaking up on the most careful developer.
Inactive Portals
If a Portal references a URL that cannot be located, then the normally spinning red, green and blue squares will lay
fl at. Flat Portal panels mean you should double check the URL listed for the Portal.
Leaking Light
If you create a room and the walls don't quite meet or align correctly with the ceiling, then light from the sun or
background may leak in causing unwanted lighting in the scene. This is easy to check in the Player view. If you don't
need it for anything else, turn off the Sun's light and shadows in the Settings tab of the Lighting Control palette before
lighting the environment.
Missing Textures
If you imported Viewpoint Objects and converted them to Surface Objects that now seem to be missing their textures,
then you may have forgotten to move the texture map saved as a PNG fi le to the server. The Publishing process will
move textures applied to Solid Objects, but textures from converted Viewpoint Objects need to be moved by hand
after being converted.
Scripting Errors
If your environment generates scripting errors, they will be displayed in the Chat palette when the world is loaded in
the Player. These errors will give the line number of the script and an error message that are helpful for debugging.