[X3D-Public] VRML models - was Re: Octaga?

Richard Kennaway jrk at cmp.uea.ac.uk
Thu May 5 10:12:04 PDT 2011


At 17:05 +0100 5/5/11, John Stewart wrote:
>Richard;
>
>  > Does anyone know what became of the Octaga VRML viewer?  The last 
>trace of octaga.com on the Internet Archive is from October 2009, 
>and I can't find any trace of who they were on Google.  Has their 
>code simply vanished?  Octaga is the only VRML viewer for the Mac 
>that is able to display the VRML that I generate, but every OS 
>upgrade puts it at risk.
>
>I don't know what happened to Octaga; I hope my buddy Espen from 
>Octaga is well employed, and that they have just shifted focus.
>
>Remind me - why doesn't FreeWRL work for your data again?

I was never able to work that out -- it would just crash or hang 
FreeWRL.  I was able to whittle my 1MB of VRML down to very small and 
simple examples that would fail, but there wasn't any pattern to the 
failures.  Despite a few bug fixes to FreeWRL I was never able to get 
close to being able to use it.

My VRML files contain about 3700 lines of heavily scripted and 
interdependent PROTOs, 9000 lines defining a fully articulated H-Anim 
stick figure, and a varying amount of animation data driving it.

My VRML didn't work perfectly in Octaga at first, but it got close 
enough that I was able to track down and fix what Octaga couldn't 
cope with.  It also works in Contact on a PC, but doing my program 
development on a Mac is a lot more convenient.

If anyone wants a torture test for their VRML viewer (I haven't made 
the jump to X3D yet), there's a 0.8MB example at 
http://www.cmp.uea.ac.uk/~jrk/distribution/TestSuccessiveFingers.wrl, 
and a screen shot at 
http://www.cmp.uea.ac.uk/~jrk/distribution/TestSuccessiveFingers.png
I generate these files for prototyping animations.  The production 
environment that uses my animation generator doesn't involve VRML at 
all.

The current version of FreeWRL doesn't crash on this example, but 
just renders an empty scene with the correct background colour.

--
Richard Kennaway, jrk at cmp.uea.ac.uk, http://www.cmp.uea.ac.uk/~jrk/
School of Computing Sciences,
University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, U.K.



More information about the X3D-Public mailing list