Behavior of Objects

Jerry Isdale (isdale@isx.com)
Thu, 16 Jun 94 10:19:51 PDT


At 5:16 PM 6/15/94 -0700, Eugene Chalfant wrote:
>The objects should also contain behavior as well as appearance. For example,
>I may choose to cast myself as a purple talking alligator who says "Ouch!"
>when kicked.

I too agree that it would be nice if (IWBNI) the VRML could encompass
object behavior as well as geometry and placement. However, this is a
highly application dependent aspect at present. No two commercial (or PD)
VR systems use the same behavior scripting language. Even those various
systems that use the Rend386 WLD format rarely replicate the V5 scripting
language (which is a pretty crude system - being only a state machine).

We would need to have an extensible, o-o, interpretive language with full
source code available free on the net ( public domain). My personal choice
would be a Threaded Interpretive Language, since they are fast, simple and
portable. There is actually a fairly decent TIL designed for use in
virtual environments. It is called TRIX and was developed by Randy Walser
(et al) while at AutoDesk's Cyberia project. Randy gave a presentation on
TRIX at the Meckler VR'93 conference and that paper was subsequently
published on the Net. It is available as
ftp://ftp.u.washington.edu/pub/virtual-worlds/papers/Walser.Anti-std. (an
excellent site to browse) I understand that Autodesk and Mr Walser are
working on releasing TRIX into the public domain.

There are some commercial TILs geared for the Virtual Environments. Marc De
Groot has announced MEME, which currently uses Renderware as the image
generator code (nice for added portablity). MEME has some nice distributed
computation features.

Any other canidates?

==============================
Jerry Isdale
System Engineer
Illusion, Inc.
2660 Townsgate Rd., Suite 530
Westlake Village, CA 91361

Phone: (805) 371-4530 FAX: (805) 371-4533
Internet: isdale@isx.com

Standards aren't