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SGI Cosmo Software 1997 May
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SGI Cosmo Software 1997 May.iso
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docs6.2
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relnotes
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cosmoplayer
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ch3.z
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ch3
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1997-05-23
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- 1 -
3. _C_h_a_n_g_e_s__a_n_d__A_d_d_i_t_i_o_n_s
This is the third release of Cosmo Player. The
following changes have been made since the 1.0.1
release.
+o The appearance and behavior of some VRML content may
change when viewed using 1.0.2 as a result of changes
to the VRML specification itself. The "Moving Worlds"
VRML 2.0 ISO/IEC 14772-1 Specification was sent to the
ISO committee for final ratification in May, 1997.
Cosmo Player 1.0.2 has been revised to be ISO spec
compliant. Visit http://vrml.sgi.com/moving-worlds/
for an overview, and http://vrml.sgi.com/moving-
worlds/spec for the official, final version of the ISO
specification, and a list of all changes and
modifications to earlier versions of the specification.
A list of all changes from the original August 4, 1996
VRML 2.0 spec to the ISO spec may be found on:
http://vrml.sgi.com/moving-
worlds/spec.DIS/index.html#Summary
+o This release of Cosmo Player supports the External
Authoring Interface. This means that you can create a
Java applet inside of an HTML page and access the
browser and the scene graph inside via the EAI. _T_o _g_e_t
_C_o_s_m_o _P_l_a_y_e_r _t_o _r_e_c_o_g_n_i_z_e _t_h_e _E_A_I _J_a_v_a _c_l_a_s_s_e_s, _y_o_u
_m_u_s_t _a_d_d /_u_s_r/_C_o_s_m_o_P_l_a_y_e_r/_c_l_a_s_s_e_s _t_o _y_o_u_r _C_L_A_S_S_P_A_T_H!
Please see the documentation or
hhhhttttttttpppp::::////////vvvvrrrrmmmmllll....ssssggggiiii....ccccoooommmm////mmmmoooovvvviiiinnnngggg----wwwwoooorrrrllllddddssss////ssssppppeeeecccc////EEEExxxxtttteeeerrrrnnnnaaaallllIIIInnnntttteeeerrrrffffaaaacccceeee....hhhhttttmmmmllll
for more information.
+o Textures are now spec compliant. According to spec,
textures affect only the ambient and diffuse material
components and do not modify the specular and emissive
components. This is different from OpenGL which uses
the texture to modify all material components. One
example of how this can make an object look completely
different in this release compared to how the same
object appeared in the previous release is a textured
object that has a pure white emissive material to
simulate a non-lit object. The object will appear all
white with no texture because the emissive component is
not textured. Rendering such textured objects requires
two rendering passes. As such, only objects with a
high specular or emissive component contribution are
rendered in this manner.
- 2 -
+o When the "Nice Transparency" option is turned off, the
rendering of objects with transparent textures is much
improved over previous versions.
+o The VrmlScript implementation is nearly spec compliant
in this release, with full Browser Object support. See
Chapter 5 for more information on the remaining
limitations of this implementation.
+o The order of operations in the TextureTransform node
have been reversed as required by the ISO revision of
the spec. This change was made by the ISO committee so
that textures can be scaled non-uniformly and rotated
without warping the texture.
+o Performance LOD nodes have been implemented (LOD nodes
without range values specified).
+o The browser is now much stricter in determining which
node types can be added to grouping nodes. Previous
releases allowed illegal nodes to be added but ignored
them. In this release, illegal child nodes are not
added to the scene. This may prevent the scene from
loading.
The following changes have been made since the 1.0
release.
+o Textures and EXTERNPROTOS are now fetched once per URL,
and subsequent uses of the same URL do not require
additional fetches or memory use.
+o Movie Textures have been significantly optimized for
the O2 platform when using the IRIX 6.3 version of
Cosmo Player. Framerates up to 30 frames per second
have been achieved using the new Unified Memory
Architecture features of the O2 workstation.
Additional optimizations are likely in future releases
of Cosmo Player.
+o Kanji fonts are now supported for the VRML Text node.
Note that you MUST set your LANG environment variable
to "ja_JP.EUC" in order for this to work. Look for
further localizations in future releases.