—UPDATE NOTES

 

The following lists the changes in the version of 3Space dated Tuesday , November 10, 2000:

Changes in the XML format:

The Scene element now includes a copyright attribute. the copyright must be included otherwise the player won't display the scene. The copyright tag must be:
copyright="Copyright TGS 2000 (subject to license)"
The color element can now be set on a GeomURL node. It adds the given color to all the material color to produce a kind of highlight.
For Collision events, the target attribute can contain a list of solids separated by ;

New elements:

A new ExtraParam element has been added to facilitate user data insertion inside the XML document. This is necessary for Netscape 4 which does not support XML natively. so it is not possible to handle complex user data without using the internal XML parser of the player. This element does not have an id attribute. Its only attribute is a name. Thus multiple instances of the same parameter can be used.

New Attributes: 

The Scene element now includes an onLoad attribute. onLoad can be used to define a script function called when the scene is loaded in order to set-up global variables or user data structures.
SolidCamera contains now two new attributes: target and direction.
target is a solid identifier. The camera always look at this object.
direction is a vector defining the view direction.
This two new attributes and the targetPoint are complementary. They allows you to easily implement complex camera features.
GeomURL have a new attribute called name. This is a string defining the name of the group defined in the ZAP file. This attribute replaces the group attribute by giving a more percise control over the content of the ZAP file. The name is defined in Amapi3D as the group name of an object.

New Methods:

The following methods have been added to the player: TSCreateNode, TSAppendChild, TSSetAttribute, TSUpdateNodeAttribute, TSSetSource, TSSetExtraParam, TSGetExtraParam.
These methods allows you to manage the scene completely without using the XML DOM of the web browser. This is useful for non XML browsers such as Netscape 4.

Improvements:

The methods of the player have been renamed. They are now prefixed with TS.

The TSGetAttribute now returns the correct value for all the attribute types of all the elements.

User Event callbacks have two additional parameters X and Y. They represent the position of the cursor in the graphic window when the event occured. This is useful for implementing drag actions.

The rendering is now always fully accelerated even in 16 bits mode when an accelerated 3D board exists. This gives much better performances on old 3D boards not optimized for OpenGL.

Memory management has been improved.

Opening multiple instances of the player now works.

Proximity events and collision events handling have been improved

The 3Space plug-in is now available for Netscape 4 on Mac and PC

The precision of the collision detection algorithm has been improved. The minimal distance between objects has been reduced from 1cm to 1mm.

On Windows, the player changes the cursor when it is over a solid containing mouse events. (Not yet on Mac)

On Windows, the player changes the cursor loading a file. It also displays a loading message in the status bar. (Not yet on Mac)

Known problems:

The Direct3D renderer is disabled in this version.
On Mac, the 3Space plug-in does not work with Internet Explorer 5.x. Use Netscape 4.

On Mac and PC, the 3Space plug-in does not work with Netscape 6. Use Netscape 4.

 

On Mac, loading a file containing text is very slow. Will be improved soon.

 

Changing the value of some attributes dynamically may not work in some cases.

 

 

The following lists the changes in the version of 3Space dated Monday, April 10, 2000:

Changes in the XML format:

When collision volumes are not given, objects cannot collide. This differs from the previous version. 
Event elements are now open so that you can add your own XML elements as children of event elements. This is useful for passing more parameters to the event handler.

New elements:

A Fog element has been added. The fog color and maximum visibility distance can be set.
A DampingSolid element can be used to control the damping of forces on an object basis. It gives more precise control over force attenuation than the global damping.

New Attributes: 

A material attribute can be used on text and basic geometry to control their material properties such as shininess and transparency.
The effect parameter of the Limit element has been implemented.
Text attributes now include height and thickness attributes.
GeomURL elements supports a scale attribute to allow you to define the size of geometry defined as ZAP files. 
A group attribute has been added for GeomURL and VolGeometry elements. It allows to store several geometries in a single file using group identifiers. Amapi 3D has a new export type (3Space) that can be used to generate such files. 

Improvements:

Text is now smoothed. Its appearance is nicer. 
Lighting has been improved to give a better image quality.
Several problems have been fixed. The stability is much better.
When the camera moves, the examiner feature has been turned off. More sophisticated navigation features to come.
Some attributes couldn't be changed (light states, ...). Fixed now. 
Collision detection between boxes has been implemented. 
Performance problems with collision detection have been fixed.

Known problems:

Some hardware devices do not support stencil buffers in Direct3D nor in OpenGL. Thus user events do not work on solids.
When animation is on the player, the dynamic engine uses 100% of the CPU. This may cause a cursor flickering on slow graphic boards. This will be fixed soon.
Collision detection works only on a subset of collision volume.
Fog does not work properly on Direct3D.
Resizing may cause a crash if you are using Direct3D
Lighting looks different with OpenGL and Direct3D.

 

The following lists the changes in the version of 3Space dated Monday, March 20, 2000:

Changes in the XML format:

The type attribute of events has been renamed to eventType. An XML parser error will occur if you try to run old files.
The Scene element must have an identifier as other elements. A XML parser error will occur if you try to run old files.
The rotation attribute definition has changed. It was previously defined as a quaternion. It is now given as three floats representing the rotation angles in degree around each axis: rotation = "90 0 0" represents a rotation of 90 degrees around the X axis. Old animations may not run properly if quaternion values are given instead of rotation angles.
For positional lights, the direction attribute has been removed. It is useless. An XML parser error will occur if you try to run old files.

New elements:

VolBounding: is a new type of collision volume, computing the bounding box or bounding sphere of the current solid. This is useful for text.

New Attributes:

The ambient lighting of the scene can be controlled by the ambientLight factor. This is a single floating point value ranging from 0 (no ambient light) to 1 (full ambient light).
The camera contains a headlight allowing objects to be lit even if no lights are present. The intensity of this headlight can be controlled using the camera headLight attribute. This is a single floating point value ranging from 0 (no headlight) to 1 (full headlight).

New features:

The player supports OpenGL rendering. It switches automatically to this mode if the Direct3D device is not present or does not support the hardware features required.
Rendering of textured objects and material properties is much better.

Known problems:

Collision detection is very slow in some cases. This will be fixed soon.
Some hardware devices do not support stencil buffers in Direct3D nor in OpenGL. Thus user events do not work on solids.
The first time the player is launched on a machine after a reboot, it may crash. This will not happen again until the machine is restarted.
When HTML files are downloaded from a web server and not read directly from the disk, the scene does not start. This is due to an Internet Explorer problem.
When an animation is playing, the player may use 100% of the CPU. This may cause cursor flickering on slow graphic boards.
Collision detection works only on a subset of collision volume.