Re: [openvrml-develop] Making Lookat useful

[Braden M. <br...@en...>]

On Wed, 2002-03-20 at 06:34, Nigel Stewart wrote:
> I'm very happy to hear that OpenVRML is heading towards a stable
> status.  Speaking for myself, there are two major issues with
> OpenVRML - handling of events to PROTO's (H-Anim) and examiner
> viewing for lookat.  I think I'm probably qualified enough to
> dig into the examiner issue,

What issue is that? Bose repaired examine mode some months ago.

> but the camera transformation scheme
> wasn't clear to me whan I had a (quick) look recently.  Any clues
> that can be offered here on the forum?

Look at getParentTransform and friends on Node.

The event issue with PROTOs will hopefully be resolved as part of my
rewrite of the PROTO implementation. But we have no shortage of areas
that need more love than I am able to give. It would be especially
helpful if someone were to tackle caching images inside the renderer, or
use FreeType to make our Text node support stop sucking. 

> I'm more than happy to try a snapshot, whenever that becomes
> advisable....

As I posted previously, the rearchitecture branch has stabilized and is
usable for the most part. It doesn't do PROTOs yet, but I'm working on
it. The main branch should be at least as usable as 0.11.2; hopefully
more so. So have at it. :-)

> A mozilla plug-in is certainly attractive, but my feeling is that
> compulsory dependency on extraneous libs is something to be warey of.

It would only be compulsory if you want to build lookat. If you didn't
care about building lookat, you wouldn't need Mozilla. Just like you
don't need SpiderMonkey if you don't care about JavaScript support.

> If I simply want to use OpenVRML as part of a 3D engine - do I need
> to deal with xxx.so and yyy.so?  Cygwin? Win32?  So, if there is a
> scheme that can optionally use, say, the mozilla tricks for doing
> a mozilla plugin, that would be the ideal.

Someone who wants to use the OpenVRML runtime in their application
shouldn't care about lookat except as a source of example code.

-- 
Braden McDaniel                           e-mail: <br...@en...>
<http://endoframe.com>                    Jabber: <br...@ja...>