Re: Performance report
"Bullard, Claude L (Len)" wrote: Other than having a ten year old girl from South Dakota getting friendly (Where are the parents of these kids???), it was the same as the usual gig. Sounded exactly like a usual gig then (with the groupies et all:) Some points: 1. It is easy to lose the system without enough resources to sustain multiple windows. Avoid private chats. My browser would crash and I would have to get back in and get the av back into position. Priviliged avatars. Allow people to leave their "crash faced" avatars in. Give em 2-5 min to get back into them after crash. more below... 2. The perspectives of some worlds make it harder to see than others. Sometimes, invite avs that chat to come forward. Probably a good idea once a performance to get as many as you can forward so you can get a good screen snap. This is where "seek" works fairly good. Another thing could be dimmed private worlds where you would only see your private chatters. The rest would be in a fog or just dimmed out. 3. It may be a good idea to get the world builder to put in a viewpoint for you. That way, if it crashes, you can get back into position easier. Not sure how that would be done. Could be fairy easy. Make it possible to store your own viewpoints and make them persistant. Either the worldbuilder does this or the guys holding the system behind it. 4. It would be interesting to consider the medium. These worlds are built for free-roaming chat. Yet, as graphics, they could be improved by considering that positions can be a bit more organized visually. This is something for stage builders to consider: automated blocking, perhaps but gridding the world and having a script to set positions. This should be totally up to the stage builders or even the coreogfx's people. However somehow it has to be covered by the underlying mu-tech i guess. I think the online concerts are picking up attention. The audio is good enough and the experience interesting enough to work. I finaly got some time to start doing COM EAI. It's very easy with VB to build your own client and put in some behavior, with C++ it get's more effecient but takes longer time (as usual). It's nice to be able to use VRML without the overhead of a HTML browser. Sort of back to basic again. It would be nice to be able to use these clients as plugins to eg Winamp. Currently I'm doing some experiments with it, but the soundcard on my machine at home is broken so I can't do any winamp stuff there and at work I'm supposed to be doing .. something else. Whatever, what it means is that when you tune in to one of your mp3 radio stations via Winamp your mu-vrml-browser plugin would load a scene with all others connected to that mp3 station. Sort of cool I think. The other cool feature I put myself upto is getting the vrml to work with winamp in a way that it reacts to the music. This isn't exactly hard to do, but I need to get them connected and have some AV's that can dance before I go any further on that. Anyway, the result would be a stage with AV's representing the band currently playing. Should be stored on local device (for instance your a CD you get from the mp3 station). It would be easier to sync that way and there is no need for MU in that. Performance shouldn't be much of a problem. Most of the heavy stuff is done outside the browser, in VB or C++ (whatever COM). Earlier I did bumbper texturing in Java (and CP via JSAI) but now I converted it into C++. Runs MUCH MUCH faster and the memory stoped leaking. The downside is ofcourse that you can't use your favourite browser, but I'm sort of fed up with all the hazzle it takes to get it working. Even though this isn't web-browser friendly I hope someone wants to use it. Now I even fooled my brother into this now so the community is allready there :) Well, enough for today, I don't get payed for fooling around with VRML anymore :-\ /Niclas
non-linear storylines
surprise subject :) Anyone has a paper or wrote a paper on visualisation and navigation of interactive non-linear storylines? need it for a project a.s.a.p What i'm intereseted in is not really how to build or structure the storylines (even though it's closly connected), it's more how you could visualize the storyline and make a good interface in 3d (possible 2d) to navigate them. I'm also facing the possibility to have several storylines that could (based on users feedback) connect to eachother dynamically at runtime (as some sort of "added value" links) if needed. Even though it's not my main concern, notation and acctual storage is also of interest. I have an Oracle8i (that *will* be used anyway) which has the capability of doing OO structures that i can imagine could be useful. I'm also very concerned with separating the structure from the presentation (layout) which sort of implies XML. Someone maybe have seen a DTD for this (len:)? The visualization is of course done with VRML :) Cheers, /Niclas -- niclas olofsson christian doegl virtual real-estate gmbh mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] breite gasse 3, a-1070 vienna http://www.dc.co.at fon: ++43 1 526 29 67 fax: ++43 1 526 29 67 11 -- visit our new real-estate service site - http://www.virtualrealestate.at
Re: Happy St. Patrick's Day with IrishSpace!
Long time no see Paul, Paul Hoffman wrote: To celebrate St. Patrick's Day: I finished the conversion of IrishSpace to the Web. To give you some facts... I tested this on the PIII with 2 browser combinations and the results are... NS4.5, CP2.1.1 - Everything runs perfectly. Doing 20-30fps in avarage. Sound streams perfect and it just looks GREAT. IE4.x, Contact. PIII enhanced with hw acc enabled. Full smooth textures and whatever you can choose to make it heavier and better looking. Runs at 40-65fps in avarage (some sidesteps down to 20fps at certain viewpoints) and just looks GREAT. Sounds working but Contact warns on some of the scripts. I'll look into this during this weekend and see if I can fix it. Also Virtual Real-Estate (the company I now work for) is offering to host this if it is technically solvible (it's a european server). I can also continue the investigation on CD's. oh... and of course a thousand THANKS for bringing this out on the web and this including new exiting tech to the community. /Niclas -- niclas olofsson christian doegl virtual real-estate gmbh mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] breite gasse 3, a-1070 vienna http://www.dc.co.at fon: ++43 1 526 29 67 fax: ++43 1 526 29 67 11
Re: Huh?
Sandy Ressler wrote: Bingo! You got that one right...VRML is an output medium, a technology for displaying 3D graphics over the web. Storytelling is a motivation for many people involved with this technology but is quite separate. He :P Have to stick my nose in here for a second (well need something else to think about for a moment:) my 2 euros I don't know Sandy, but I sort of dissagree on that a little bit. IMHO and to me it's the fundamental difference in the defenition of the word "storytelling" that is somewhat confused here. The defenition of storytelling I'm working by now (and which is also the very base on what I work with) is somewhat more information orientated. In simple (abstract) words it would mean that it's the how we present some piece of information to the viewer, ie - The path of which we lay out the data which in its turn is the ground for the information we want to communicate to our viewers (puhh, you can start breathing again now:). To me VRML is that very path. As it seem to me I often have several possible ways to present the information in. The way I choose is pretty much based on How (or the way) I want it to be presented and the way is very much tech-oriented. This is where stuff like polygon counts, fps etc etc comes into play. Ok, I can agree on that we maybe shouldn't adjust the storytelling itself from the type of media, but in real life you don't make money that way I would say (at least not in the business I'm working in). We normaly work with storyboards for our projects. The only difference from the ones Disney (for example) use is that ours show a snapshot of information in a surtain fraction of time state or maybe different views of the same information(?). If you would define the Disney version of story telling I think you would still see very much resemblence. Even thought it's up to others than me to define, my opinion about it is that you could see Disney storyboards like a snapshot of the message (every Disney movie have a message right) in a surtain augenblick. The development of technologies for their own sake is fine for pure engineer science types but the development of technologies driven by other motivations (storytelling, education, e-commerce) is much richer. That is something I agree on. If we remeber what the *real* vision (or at least the thing that join most of us) for VRML is (talking cyberspace) it's not that very far from the thruth ither. That's maybe why we so often seem to mix tech with philosofy in these community, like on this very list?! /Niclas -- niclas olofsson christian doegl virtual real-estate gmbh mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] breite gasse 3, a-1070 vienna http://www.dc.co.at fon: ++43 1 526 29 67 fax: ++43 1 526 29 67 11
The strangest meeting...
se he thought it had something "real" over it in the middle of the madness and that every scene seemed to communicate a message even though he couldn't understand exactly how himself (that's also something I think the big gods of 3d gfx tend to keep to them selves). Unfocused for a while.. sorry.. A small question for you (if you are still with me). I can be pretty sure of that he won't peek himself so it's really up to me... Would You show him the 3d stuff (aka VRML) before he wrote the script? What would you say are the cons and pros of doing that? Ok, the outcome of this meeting is still to be seen but we promised eachother to start working on this before summer so we will see what happens. I promise to keep you posted, but just wanted to share the experience just beacuse, as I said in the beginning, I found it most interesting myself :P One thing is for sure, it will defenently be the longest script he will ever be writing, at least relative to the viewing-time it will get :) /Niclas - let me know when you found the 3'rd lie :) -- niclas olofsson christian doegl virtual real-estate gmbh mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] breite gasse 3, a-1070 vienna http://www.dc.co.at fon: ++43 1 526 29 67 fax: ++43 1 526 29 67 11
Re: Thoughts on 'the long view'
on and then I would be glad. I don't need the new stuff that everybody is talking about (except streaming audio) since the rest I always think to my self when I see, "Well, that's just another PROTO!". Oh, and one more thing.. LibVRML97/Lookat http://www.vermontel.net/~cmorley/vrml.html Do I need to say more? /Niclas -- niclas olofsson christian doegl virtual real-estate gmbh mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] breite gasse 3, a-1070 vienna http://www.dc.co.at fon: ++43 1 526 29 67 fax: ++43 1 526 29 67 11
