Re: FLASH: Shockwave 3D (was: Max, Strata)

[John Dowdell]

At 2:23 PM 7/25/0, Wayne Townsend wrote:

> They have a long, long way to go to even resemble Pulse3D


Pulse3D is a nice engine, and I'm glad it's doing the job for some of your

sites.


It's dedicated to a different task, however... if you'll examine its

output, it's generally single talking heads.


The Intel drop-in renderer to the Shockwave Player makes a castmember of a

view into a world. This world can have multiple objects, all

controllable... the camera can be navigated too... individual object

properties and even shapes can be altered in realtime under scripting

control.


(How complex a world? The multi-res surfaces means that level-of-detail

drops as an object moves away from the camera... the complexity of an

individual object can vary with the current rendering demands. There's

still an upper limit on how complex a single world can be, but the limits

are much more elastic than in fixed-res models.)


The host and interactivity are significant too... where the Pulse3D Player

uses browser JavaScript (with its browser dependencies, similar to

FSCommand), the Shockwave Player contains its own compiled scripting, very

fast, very extensive. Interactivity is more predictable than when relying

on the browsers.


Although they're both described by words like "web" and "3D", I think

you'll find they offer different possibilities. It's similar to how SWF and

PDF can both be described by "web" and "vectors", yet they offer different

things.




At 2:13 PM 7/25/0, Naqvi, Tony wrote:

> While the figures for Shockwave installed web users is big,

> it's not anywhere near that of the installed-base of Flash.


Don't bother waiting for a realtime 3D renderer in the small Flash Player.

If it *could* do that, then it wouldn't be the "small" Flash Player

anymore, and would not have that massive distribution.


Realtime 3D rendering is different than using 2D sprite techniques upon

prerendered 3D content... more info's in my last message.


And don't pooh-pooh Shockwave's distribution, just because it isn't as

overwhelming as Flash's... it's still among the top five web technologies,

with majority installation. The key concept is the auto-updating which

makes the new renderer very quickly available.



For desktop computers we've finally on the verge of having a

*fully-deployed* standardized renderer... this is very exciting.



jd







John Dowdell, Macromedia Tech Support, San Francisco CA US

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