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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