Re: [consortium] Re: [x3d-public] dedicated working-group focus on X3D interoperability

[Alan Hudson <giles@yumetech.com>]

John A. Stewart wrote:
> Don;
>
> Congratulations on this working group, and of the moratorium on new
> nodes. Most certainly, the number of nodes in X3D, and the rate they
> are being placed, is staggering.
>
> Can I email my thoughts on this?
>
> Athough FreeWRL tries to support as many nodes as possible, I think
> that the X3D "problem" could be solved differently. This view comes
> from many years of hacking about with FreeWRL.
>
> Quite simply put, all of the Triangle and *2D nodes could be dispensed
> with. Same with some others. Focus should be on optimization techniques
> to render shapes quickly, on given hardware.
>
> What we appear to be doing is to move that optimization level up the  food
> chain; making our job easier. That's not correct - we should be making
> the job of the authors (and, authoring programs) easier.
Two cents American back to ya :)

A big driver for providing the Triangle* nodes and the Shaders is that a 
lot of our users are actually fairly savy graphics wise.  They desire 
some fairly low level control.  I've seen so many worlds that try to 
create dynamic geometry with an IndexedFaceSet.  IFS is a good transport 
format.  Its a lowsy programming construct.  Deconstructing it requires 
a lot of cycles.  Removing -1's is a pain.  Several rules like normal 
generation, texture generation etc are expensive.

We have two very different user communites to support.  One I call the 
3D HTML community.  They want 3D graphics and want it as a easy to 
produce as HTML.  The other community is a group of programmers that 
want to make Virtual Worlds or Applications.  This is a much harder 
group to please.  Over time they eventually want access to the 
underlying graphics system.  We've abstracted a good chunk away, but in 
general its never enough.

The best content teams I've seen have had at least one of those 
programmer types.  They pull out at the magic when needed.  If X3D 
doesn't allow that then X3D worlds will not look nearly as good as other 
technologies.

But in general I agree with you.  For most things let the browser 
optimize it for you.

--
Alan Hudson

President Yumetech, Inc.                               www.yumetech.com
President Web3D Consortium                             www.web3d.org
206 340 8900
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