Re: [x3d-public] Shaders and Triangles: was dedicated working-group focus on X3D interoperability

[Alan Hudson <giles@yumetech.com>]

Dave A wrote:
> Len and Alan: good points all, well taken
>
> I can see some need for the fine control of specifying how something 
> gets into the hardware
> (triangle-whatnots vs IFS), but I'd rather see field creep rather than 
> node creep, where
> possible. IFS with 'tesselationHint' = "TRIFAN" "TRISTRIP" "DONTCARE" 
> etc, for example.
> Like Normals are at the moment (admired but not required).
> And if things get tough for the brower programmers, ask for help! 
> Perhaps there's some
> code or algorithms floating around somewhere someone can contribute.
> Taken to absurd extremes, the easiest thing for browser programmers (god 
> bless 'em, by the way)
> is to just deal with lowest-level stuff. Then why have a high-level 
> language at all?

The triangle nodes were not added to make implementation easier.  In 
fact they were more work.  They were added to give X3D programmers a 
more effecient way of greating dynamic content.  IFS is just not that 
effecient a way of specifying geometry.

John's point is well taken, keep the language simple.  I'd suggest the 
trade is worthwhile in this case as it enables us to avoid a whole bunch 
of other nodes.  In theory(and this is where it gets interesting) we 
don't need Nurbs, Extrusions, ElevationGrid, Sphere, Box et el as we 
have an extensible way of creating geometry now.  Ie a set of PROTO's 
could be provided that implemented these things and they wouldn't need 
to be in the base spec.

Of course likely that would look like script code stored someplace on 
Web3D.org.  What language, ecmascript?  Could do but its not as 
effecient as I'd like for really large worlds...

So we still end up with some higher-order nodes.  But maybe we don't 
have to.

IFS seems too complicated to be the base building block.  It can do most 
everything(strips and fans excluded for now).  But its a big hammer.

--
Alan Hudson

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