[x3d-public] Game engines as x3d browsers

[Don Brutzman]

Projects Wish List shows 2 resources:

	http://www.web3d.org/projects/wish-list

* Latest effort:  UnityX3D project on GitHub (with Web3D 2015 demo images)

	http://github.com/thefranke/unityx3d (last update 27 days ago)

	Tobias Franke demo snapshot from Web3D 2015:
	https://twitter.com/Web3DConsortium/status/612285325403123712

* Initial effort:  UnityX3D project on SourceForge (with example conversion)

	https://sourceforge.net/projects/unityx3d (last update 2013-04-24)

	Dave Arendash X3DOM example (must see, totally impressive)
	http://www.davearendash.com/webgl/x3dom

Meanwhile steady X3D JSON work continues.
- Discussion this week added "encoding":"UTF-8" field to X3D object for consistency with other encodings.
- Example conversion .x3d -> .json success is over 99% for 3200+ open-source archive scenes with help from John's testing scripts.
- Roy has begun creating the specification draft on Web3D's github site.
- Roy has also hand crafted a complete X3D JSON Schema that works and has caught some interesting errors in content.
- Later this spring we expect to automate generation and updates of X3D JSON Schemas for X3D versions 3.0 though 3.3 and the draft v4.0.
- X3D JSON efforts have also provided fundamental insight into current attempts to formalize an X3D Object Model for all language bindings.

We have a weekly X3D JSON teleconference kept up-to-date on the Web3D Calendar and will continue posting progress updates to this list.

	http://www.web3d.org/calendar/month

Thanks for continued looking at these possibilities Andreas, seems like a powerful opportunity!


On 3/19/2016 10:23 AM, Andreas Plesch wrote:
> While the topic in the subject was discussed probably many times, the push to VR and the announcement of unity 5.4 today had me think about the option again.
>
> There is UnityX3D which seems like a good starting point. Another option which may become viable with x3d json is to translate to Unity scene data in its YAML text format. It seems fully featured and mapable to X3D. x3d scripts are probably difficult to translate automatically to js unity scripts. Also, it is unclear if it possible to impose the x3d event cascade but the engine seems pretty flexible.
>
> There idea would be to convert the x3d js objects to unity js objects based on the YAML, serialize them to YAML with js-yaml, and then load them into the unity editor for export to any platform, after some final tweaking.
>
> Overall, it would be a lot of work and also introduce a dependence on game engines. The advantage is wide platform support including webgl as well as VR support including special controllers.
>
> UnityX3D is available on sourceforge, Is it still maintained ?
>
> Andreas

all the best, Don
-- 
Don Brutzman  Naval Postgraduate School, Code USW/Br       brutzman at nps.edu
Watkins 270,  MOVES Institute, Monterey CA 93943-5000 USA   +1.831.656.2149
X3D graphics, virtual worlds, navy robotics http://faculty.nps.edu/brutzman