The situation is very different for plug-ins on your office's intranet, because you know what tools are available to users there. The big gun today in Internet animation is the Java language. Java animations are applets, operating system-independent programs that are transferred from the server to the viewer's computer for playback. But Java applications are complex to create, and you may need them only for interactive animations, which can be different for every user or each playback depending on inputs. Java has failed to live up to its early hype as a universal language.
Some developers complain that implementing cross-platform applets causes system crashes.
These could be from browser problems rather than Java, but the result is the same. Many agencies worry about security breaches from distributed applets, which are platform-independent programs that could hide destructive code. Such concerns may influence users to block rather than view your Java animations. Movie magic Graphics users often dream of creating images as lifelike as those in high-budget movies. It's easy to make realistic water, sky and landscape backgrounds with specialized packages such as Bryce from MetaTools Inc.or WorldBuilder from AnimaTek Inc., but they come at a high cost in software and processing time.