Cosmo Player 2.1 Prerelease 
Release Notes
for MacIntosh

still to do

• Conix info - where's the contract, what are our obligations, what version are we shipping
• Apple info needs verification
• known bugs
• should links now point to www.cosmosoftware.com?
• everything labelled with a "???"

These Release Notes describe the prerelease of Cosmo Software's Cosmo Player 2.1 for MacIntosh. The following sections are included:

1. Legal Notices
2. Differences Between Cosmo Player Versions
3. What's Included in This Release
4. Recommended Hardware Configuration
5. Online Help
6. VRML Support
7. Known Bugs and Limitations
8. Reporting Bugs
9. Trouble Shooting
10. Software Updates
11. VRML Developer Information

1. Legal Notices

Software License Agreement

Cosmo(tm) Player 2.1 Prerelease for MacIntosh

Developed by Silicon Graphics, Inc. 2011 N. Shoreline Boulevard, Mountain View, CA 94043 Copyright © 1998, Silicon Graphics, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Silicon Graphics®, OpenGL® and the Silicon Graphics Logo® are registered trademarks and the OpenGL logo(tm), Cosmo(tm), the Cosmo logo(tm), Cosmo Worlds(tm) and Cosmo(tm) Player are trademarks of Silicon Graphics, Inc. SoundSprocket and the AppearanceManager are trademarks or registered trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc.

COSMO(tm) SOFTWARE LICENSE AGREEMENT*

SILICON GRAPHICS, INC., BY AND THROUGH COSMO SOFTWARE, A SILICON GRAPHICS COMPANY ("Cosmo"), IS WILLING TO LICENSE COSMO SOFTWARE TO YOU ONLY UPON THE CONDITION THAT YOU ACCEPT ALL OF THE TERMS CONTAINED IN THIS LICENSE AGREEMENT ("Agreement"). READ THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF THIS LICENSE CAREFULLY. YOUR USE OF THE LICENSED SOFTWARE INDICATES YOUR ASSENT TO BE BOUND BY THE LICENSE TERMS SET FORTH BELOW.

1. DEFINITIONS

The "Cosmo"(tm) software in binary form (hereafter "Licensed Software") is provided to you subject to Cosmo's copyright and other intellectual property rights.

2. LICENSE GRANT AND NOTICES

Cosmo and its licensors retain exclusive ownership of the Licensed Software. Cosmo hereby grants to you ("you") a non-exclusive license to use a single copy of the Licensed Software. No license is granted to you for any other purpose. The above license is subject to all terms of this Agreement including, without limitation, the following: 1. You agree not to reverse engineer or disassemble the Licensed Software.   2. You agree not to remove or obscure proprietary notices of Cosmo ( You agree not to alter the size, color and quality of the logo).

3. RESTRICTED RIGHTS.

RESTRICTED RIGHTS: Use, duplication, or disclosure by the U.S. Government is subject to restrictions of FAR 52.227-14(g)(2)(6/87) and FAR 52.227-19(6/87), or DFAR 252.227-7015(b)(6/95) and DFAR 227.7202-3(a).

4. DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY

COSMO PROVIDES THE LICENSED SOFTWARE TO YOU "AS IS". COSMO MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES ABOUT THE LICENSED SOFTWARE, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, AND HEREBY EXPRESSLY DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT). NEITHER COSMO NOR ITS LICENSORS SHALL BE LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES SUFFERED BY YOU AS A RESULT OF USING, MODIFYING OR DISTRIBUTING THE LICENSED SOFTWARE OR ITS DERIVATIVES.

5. LIMITATION OF LIABILITY

IN NO EVENT SHALL EITHER PARTY BE LIABLE FOR ANY LOST REVENUES OR PROFITS, OR OTHER SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING WITH RESPECT TO THE LICENSED SOFTWARE AND RELATED MATERIALS OR ARISING OUT OF THIS AGREEMENT, EVEN IF SUCH PARTY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

This provision shall survive the expiration or termination of this Agreement.

6. MISCELLANEOUS

This Agreement shall automatically terminate if you fail to comply with its terms.

This Agreement is made under and shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the State of California, U.S.A., without reference to conflict of laws principles. By using or copying this Licensed Software, You agree to abide by the intellectual property laws and all other applicable laws of the U.S. (including without limitation the export laws of the United States) and the terms of this license.

Other Copyright Notices

• JPEG Software - Copyright 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, Thomas G. Lane. All Rights Reserved. Code from the Independent JPEG Group was used in Cosmo Player.
• Portions include gzip - Copyright (C) 1992-1993 Jean-loup Gailly.
• Portions include modified sources from the Group 42 PNG reference library, Copyright (C) 1995, 1996 Guy Eric Schalnat, Group 42, Inc. See http://www.group42.com/png.htm for more details.

2. Differences Between Cosmo Player Versions

New features and bug fixes in Cosmo Player 2.x include the following:

• The user interface has been redesigned to be more intuitive and natural.
• The Cosmo Player console has been introduced to display errors, warnings, information, and developmental print() statements.
• OpenGL is used as the rendering API in Cosmo Player 2.1.
• Java is supported in the Script node in CP 2.1. For the latest specification, please see the Revised Java Appendix available via the VRML97 specification.

Cosmo Player 2.0 was not released for the MacIntosh.

3. What's Included in This Release

• Conix OpenGL support

???
 
• Cosmo Player Netscape plugin

The Cosmo Player plugin, CosmoPlayer, is installed in the Cosmo folder in the active Systems Extension folder, and then aliased to the Netscape plug-ins folder.
 

• Cosmo Player Supporting Shared Libraries

All other Shared Libraries required by Cosmo Player are installed by default in the Cosmo folder in the active Systems Extension folder
 
 

• Cosmo Player External Authoring Interface Java classes (EAI) and Java in the Script Node Authoring Interface classes (JSAI)
• These classes are installed in the CosmoPlayer.jar file in the Netscape plugins directory.
• Example VRML scene

One example VRML scene is provided with this release. By default it is installed in ???. For additional examples, see the index of example worlds on the Cosmo VRML web site.
 

• VRML 1.0 to VRML 2.0 converter

*ouch* - vrml1tovrml2 is not in the alpha version of the mac Cosmoplayer.

Cosmo Player will automatically convert VRML 1.0 files to 2.0 on read. If you prefer to permanently convert your VRML 1.0 files to 2.0, a standalone converter, vrml1tovrml2.exe ???, is also provided. By default, the converter is installed where the other DLLs are installed.
 

• GZIP

All data formats can now be gzip compressed. This can make significant improvements in download time for large data files.
 

• UTF8

Cosmo Player will read and convert utf8 characters in a VRML file into Unicode characters for display.
 

• These Release Notes

These Release Notes are by default installed in ???.  For the most up-to-date release information, check the Cosmo Software web site.

4. Recommended Configuration

• Power Macintosh running any one of the Macintosh operating systems: 7.6.1, 8.0, or 8.1
• Netscape 4.04 - with 15 meg of memory allocated to the Netscape process
• 20MB disk space
• 16-bit color depth

5. Online Help

6. VRML Support

Media support ???.

7. Known Bugs and Limitations

Installation Issues

• We do not support Internet Explorer on the MacIntosh.
• It is strongly recommended that all previous versions of Cosmo Player be removed before installing an updated version.

NonVRML Issues

1. We have known memory leaks of approximatley 400k per world.

 
2. Temporary files created at runtime are created in the Netscape application folder and are not cleaned up properly.  It may be necessary for you to delete the temporary files on occassion.   These files will be of the form temp0000000.

 
3. If the control panel (i.e., the dashboard) appears too dark then it is quite likely that your monitor is not set up correctly.  Resetting your monitors brightness and contrast so that the control panel is pleasantly visible should improve the visual quality of Cosmo Player and all other applications.

 
4. The user interface components are not final. This includes the preference panel, the Cosmo Player console, the file icons, and the Cosmo Player cursors.

 
5. The "Save As" button in the console is not operational.

 
6. There are intermittent redraw problems with the Cosmo Player control panel - for example, sometimes it is not drawn when the Player first begins execution.

 
7. In scene animations run slowly unless mouse events are going into the scene.  This animation performance issue involves our interaction with Netscape. To run the animations at "full speed" keep moving the mouse in the player window.

 
8. Embedded ... if not matching something ... will cause Netscape to crash.???

VRML support

• Java related issues
• Examples
• A set of simple examples using the JSAI (Java Script Authoring Interface) and the EAI (External Authoring Interface) can be found at the Player developer web site.
• LiveConnect - EAI - Netscape 4.x :
• getBrowser() method might return null when a "reload" is done due to a bug in LiveConnect. Restart the application to make LiveConnect work again.
• Exceptions
• Exceptions longer than 32 characters do not work on the MacIntosh (InvalidNavigationTypeException, InvalidVrmlSyntaxException). In the cases where these exceptions should be thrown, a top-level Exception Object is thrown instead.

 
• Lights
• The assert that sometimes appears in PointLight support can be safely ignored.

 
• Point and spot lights ignore their radius fields. Therefore, these light types illuminate the entire scene. The intensity fields can be used to limit the effect of the illumination.  Directional lights are scoped properly by their parent group as defined by the spec.

 
• Normals
• On occassion, computed normals are -um- random.

 
• MovieTexture
• The MovieTexture node is not supported in this prerelease of Cosmo Player.

 
• Interpolators
• The ColorInterpolator interpolates in RGB space. It should be in HSV space.
• The NormalInterpolator does a linear interpolation of the normals, followed by a projection to the unit sphere. It should interpolate on the surface of the unit sphere.

 
• Audio
• Looping audio has a 25 - 50 msec gap at the loop point.

 
• Multiple instances of Cosmo Player may produce sound from only one instance. This is due to the Microsoft provided functionality. If there are no native directSound drivers for the audio device being used to render sound, then windows falls back to an emulation mode which uses the windows WAVE functions. There is a known issue where two applications cannot simultaneously have the WAVE device open at the same time. Thus, if your audio device does not have native directSound drivers, then you can only get sound from one process at a time. Note that under NT4.0, DirectSound *always* uses emulation mode. So, if you're running NT4.0, then you will never be able to have two processes with audio active at the same time. This should be fixed by NT5.0 because the hardware vendors are promising native DirectSound drivers under NT5.0.

 
• Navigation Speed
• This release of Cosmo Player interprets the NavigationInfo node's "speed" field more literally than previous releases. This change makes Cosmo Player more spec-compliant than before, and allows content authors to confidently specify the proper navigation speed for a world (since the browser will now closely adhere to the specified speed).

Specifically, in the WALK viewer, navigation with the keyboard arrow keys now moves the camera at exactly the speed specified in the current NavigationInfo node. Navigation with the mouse allows some flexibility, but by default the user will not be able to move faster than approximately 3 times the specified speed. (Of course the user can always manually adjust the navigation speed via the Preferences panel.)

Authors should especially be aware that the default "speed" value (from the VRML97 spec) is 1 meter/sec, which is a very slow walking speed in a life-size world! (In other words, if you're building a VRML world using real-world scaling, you should probably use a NavigationInfo node with "speed" set to somewhere between 3 and 5.)

8. Reporting Bugs

The newsgroup news://cosmosoftware.com/sgi.cosmoplayer is also available for general questions and discussions on Cosmo Player. Note, this newsgroup is not a general Usenet group. Use Netscape Navigator or the MS newsreader to read and post to this newsgroup.

9. Trouble Shooting

--------

10. Software Updates

11. VRML Developer Information

At runtime, you may toggle (on/off) an in-scene display of frame rate by pressing the character '='.

You may force the display of the console at runtime by pressing the '/' key on the numeric keypad.   Pressing '<shift>-/' will hide the console.

• A print() method in Javascript to print information to the Cosmo Player console from a VRML Script node using Javascript.  (See above for how to display the console.)   For example,

     Script {

        url "javascript: 

                function initialize() {

                        print('Script 2 initialized.'); 

                        vec = new SFVec2f(0,1);

                        print('SFVec2f is ('+vec.x+','+vec.y+')');

                }"

     }

• A print() method is also available in the EAI and JSAI.  The static Browser.print() methods print the passed-in information to the Cosmo Player console. (See above for how to display the console.)  You may pass a String, int, boolean, float, double, long, or char to this method.  For example, in the EAI :

        import vrml.external.Browser;

        ...

        Browser.print("Your message here");



        or



        vrml.external.Browser.print("Your message here");



    In the JSAI :



        import vrml.Browser;

        ...

        Browser.print("Your message here");



        or



        vrml.Browser.print("Your message here");

• Using EMBED tags, it is possible to turn off visible UI (similar to a None viewer) while still providing built in navigation. This can be useful for ad banners and other stealth VRML content. Example:

<EMBED SRC="frob.wrl" WIDTH=120 HEIGHT=90 VRML-DASHBOARD=FALSE>

Note that for full page/frame plugins, you must still use an EMBED tag in HTML to get this effect, Specifying the width and height as "100%".