Artur Biesiadowski wrote:
>
> It seems to me that java3d is very good api for small scenes - with lot
> of static data.
<P>
> But what with displaying really large worlds ? I'm talking about
> something really big - a lot of terrain with trees, buildings etc.
I've seen a couple of really large world stuff done. It is quite
possible and not really as much a problem as you make it out to be. The
best person that I know who could answer your questions is my old boss
Chris Thorne. His head pops up on this list now and again and he does a
lot of work with large-scale terrain visualisation using both VRML and
Java3D.
For building large worlds, the focus is on large scale scenegraph
management rather than minute details such as dynamically adjusting LODs
etc. What you really need to deal with is loading and unloading large
portions of the scenegraph on the fly. Of course, the good thing about
this is that with a properly designed world, the user moves relatively
slowly compared to the chunk of scene that they are in. This gives you
time to adjust and add/remove the surrounding scene tiles as needed. I
once wrote a nice essay on this on how to do it in VRML, but I think
that has been lost to the mists of time.
How you deal with this is macro level management of the scenegraph.
Forget about deal with Switch and LODs they consume way too much memory.
Think about how big the tiles of your environment are and then build an
application that adds and removes these tiles on the fly by adding and
remove the BranchGroups.
Of course, the one area that I could agree that Java3D is not very good
at is building a flight simulator for jets. I just don't see it having
the grunt to do this really quickly - particularly the really fast
texture memory management that these styles of applications require. I
might work nicely for a truck/car sim but flight stuff it's pretty well
a non-starter. Actually, it would be really cool to see if someone has
implemented a MagicCarpet style game in J3d to see how that goes because
that uses many of the same type of techniques.
--
Justin Couch http://www.vlc.com.au/~justin/
Freelance Java Consultant http://www.yumetech.com/
Author, Java 3D FAQ Maintainer http://www.j3d.org/
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"Humanism is dead. Animals think, feel; so do machines now.
Neither man nor woman is the measure of all things. Every organism
processes data according to its domain, its environment; you, with
all your brains, would be useless in a mouse's universe..."
- Greg Bear, Slant
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