Re: LANG Inventor file format

Kevin Goldsmith (kmg@monk.colossal.com)
Tue, 21 Jun 1994 09:41:19 -0700


We are talking about using the Inventor file format (which is in the public
domain), not the development libraries. No matter what format we use, we are
going to have to write viewers for a bunch of different platforms...

Kevin

On Jun 21, 11:07am, John W. Barrus wrote:
> Subject: Re: LANG Inventor file format
> >John Barrus wrote:
> >>There are no distribution royalties for the SGI executables because every
> >>SGI comes with Inventor run-time libraries. One easy way to start would be
> >>to use an SGI to create the first Mosaic-like client using Inventor. That
> >>executable and source could be freely distributed without royalties or
> >>legal action.
> >
> >*Provided* you're only running on SGI machines, and moreover on SGI
> >machines with a recent version of IRIX (if I read the docs correctly,
> >Open Inventor doesn't run on older versions of the operating system).
> >That's a little limiting -- my company has only one IRIS, and it's
> >not up to IRIX 5.2 yet...
> >
> > -- Justin
> > Who rather likes Inventor, but is a
> > compulsive Devil's Advocate...
>
> The executable will _only_ run on SGI's (IRIX 5.2 and greater) and the
> source is useless unless you own the libraries on a machine on which you
> plan to compile the source. I'm sorry, I thought that was obvious.
>
> The older versions of Inventor (1.0, 1.1) do run on earlier versions of
> IRIX, including 4.0.5x, which is what many machines are running still. I
> don't know what incompatibilities have been introduced between 1.1 and 2.0
> versions of Inventor. It could be that our subset of nodes has not changed
> between releases.
>
> The first non-SGI port would require quite a bit of work, including file
> readers, graphics display code, lighting calculation code, etc., etc. No
> easy feat!
>
> John B.
>
>
>
> -------------------------
>
> John Barrus barrus@merl.com
>
> Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories 617.621.7535 (VOICE)
> 201 Broadway 617.621.7550 (FAX)
> Cambridge, MA 02139
>
>-- End of excerpt from John W. Barrus