Re: [www-vrml] some questions about X3D

[Don Brutzman <brutzman@nps.edu>]

hi Miriam.  good questions about DIS.

Overall, DIS support is improving.  Recently Xj3D directly implemented
the EspduTransform natively, and was reporting 2500 packet updates/sec
while maintaining 15 Hz framerate in a basic 1 box per entity world.
(Wow!)  We are seeing now superb performance in our AUV Workbench.
http://www.movesinstitute.org/xmsf/xmsf.html#Projects-AUV

You can put "localhost" as address if you don't want a multicast address.
There is also a fallback unicast address for a relay server if the
primary address in the EspduTransform doesn't work.  From the spec:

  SFString   [in,out] address                                    "localhost"
  SFInt32    [in,out] port                                       0         [0,65535]

  SFString   [in,out] multicastRelayHost                         ""
  SFInt32    [in,out] multicastRelayPort                         0

http://www.web3d.org/x3d/specifications/ISO-IEC-19775-FDIS-X3dAbstractSpecification/Part01/components/dis.html#EspduTransform
http://www.web3d.org/x3d/content/X3dTooltips.html#EspduTransform

Currently we can also use DIS with our VRML97 prototypes in Cortona and
Cosmoplayer.

I'm looking forward to other browsers support native DIS and also the
Java Scene Access Interface (SAI).  One of our goals at NPS for this
fall is to rewrite the DIS Prototypes using the Java SAI so that any
X3D browser with such support might easily get DIS-component capabilities.

Of course other browsers can also look at the open source implementations
of DIS to see how to do it themselves.

Future work:  we expect to start an XMSF Working Group to explore
Web Services XML into, out of, and to produce scene graphs.  Soon
I hope, awaiting finalization of the Web3D IPR member agreement so
that we can continue current work carefully.  Lots of good things
to do!  :)

all the best, Don
--
Don Brutzman  Naval Postgraduate School, Code USW/Br       work +1.831.656.2149
              MOVES Institute, Monterey CA 93943-5000 USA  fax  +1.831.656.7599
Virtual worlds/underwater robots/X3D/XMSF     http://web.nps.navy.mil/~brutzman
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