Ok, so it looks like the list is still talking to me even after having the entire system go flatline for a week. Alan and I were away at Siggraph so things didn't get sorted out too quickly. Anyway, I thought I'd just drop the list a bit of a status report and let you know what's happening in the not too distant future.
Xj3D and X3D stuff. There was lots of X3D based publicity at Siggraph this year and lots of people really interested. We pushed the message pretty hard that there's an open source toolkit to go with the spec and that seemed to get a lot of people interested. In particular, we met a lot of people from the academic/research side of the world that either use or are interested in using Xj3D for their visualisation work. One of the areas that really had people intrigued is the XML work - that is people using some other XML format and then using XSLT to transform it into X3D for rendering as 3D. Because of this expect to see us pushing a lot of work into that area over the next couple of months. Another area that users were interested in was the OpenGL renderer. Seems a lot of people have SGI-based CAVEs or other immersive environments that the OpenGL work will really benefit so we're going to concentrate on getting the OGL renderer up to scratch. It won't have the immediate broad range of capabilities of the Java3D, but expect some major improvements in the very short-term. At least we'll be doing support for multi-pipe rendering and multi-pass rendering (although this is for Elumens Domes, I'm not sure if we're making that bit public for now) Support for Xj3D seems to be reasonably good. We seem to have a lot of users, but turning some of those users into dollars to continue support is one of the major reasons we go to conferences. We can only develop the codebase as fast as we get dollars or other contributors. We sync'd up with Brad Vender again and he's just about finished the EAI implementation. He's pretty sure it's complete now so if you run into him, make sure you buy him a beer! Next he's working on SFImage and maybe MFImage handling (not sure we have the spec for that yet) and has indicated he's interested in handling the SAI external implementation code as well (it's not that much difference from the EAI). Depending on how our dollars work out, Yumetech will be hiring a part-time contractor to do some work on Xj3D's sound and video support. This should get us MovieTexture and Sound/AudioClip support in Java3D and with any luck OpenGL renderers. That will be a big step forward for the codebase as we'll then be able to pass the Floops test. Our ideal goal is for December this year to be showing off the Java3D code at least. The rest depends on how many more users we can encourage to sign up for support contracts. As a small (tiny!) company we can only do stuff as we get the dollars, so if you are a group using it for your work, we really would like you to contribute some cash back to the cause. For the two of us (Alan and I) we're doing OK, lots of feedback and potential customers, but nothing signed on the dotted line yet. We're really like to hire another couple of full time developers for working on all this stuff. On the low-end of the market, Alan and I spent a lot of time floating around in the OpenGL camps. We're joining the Khronos Group and are involved in the OpenGL ES specification work. We've already been to some working group development and we'll be working on formalised Java Bindings for OpenGL ES with the full blessing of the ARB. Because this is slated for the embedded market, we're going to be also making a variant of Xj3D to run on these devices too. That means J2ME support through the codebase. We're not entirely sure on the details yet, but expect so see this propogate through the code. Along similar lines, I caught up with the SVG and SMIL spec leads from W3C. Had a very interesting and productive chat with them about integration issues of the various specifications and how implementations need to behave and toolkits need to be organised if they are to cooperate. In addition, we pointed them at the Khronos work because SVG in particular is going through the same profiling effort as X3D is. Because there is so much similarity of the work being done, we're going to make sure that all three groups are talking together on a very regular basis. No idea on the exact formalisation of this, but I'm personally pushing for cross-membership agreements and people sitting on across the various groups. The Khronos members in particular were very keen on this - particularly the mobile phone manufacturers. It's in the best interests of all the parties that we have hardware accelarated standards for the various content types being pushed at the phone. ~ Development timescales for Xj3D ~ We're in a bit of a bind right now with what we're going to be doing. The whole lead up to Siggraph was an absolute nightmare for us. We had our major project deadline, then the M5 release for the Siggraph CD, then the real M5 release, a bunch of demo code for the conference in itself and also trying to keep up to date with the internally daily releases of the X3D spec. In addition to that I was using Qantas like a taxi service between Sydney and Seattle, renting a new appartment and really badly injuring myself following a motorcycle racing crash (wrist is still stuffed :( ). Sooooo..... We're going to try again. Because of the demos we did and a bunch of cleanups, we're going to do a M6 release in a couple of weeks time. In this we intend to fix all the M5 problems (weird CVS not tagging stuff, loader not working properly etc) and put in all the demo work we did as well as a big upgrade to the OpenGL support. Included in this release will be Multitexturing, Particle Systems and Text node support (J3D only). No firm date, but expect us to call for testing of the release candidates around the end of next week. Anyway, that's all I can think of right now. Any questions, please send direct to us as we're now back online again :) -- Justin Couch http://www.vlc.com.au/~justin/ Java Architect & Bit Twiddler http://www.yumetech.com/ Author, Java 3D FAQ Maintainer http://www.j3d.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- "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 ------------------------------------------------------------------- =========================================================================== To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "signoff JAVA3D-INTEREST". For general help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "help".
