CompuServe Messages

What spec has Specular defined? I think your assessment of the least-common-denominator is a good one. Unless the new standard includes code for an absolutely robust and portable polygon tesselator, any triangle-based program will avoid the polygon-based standard. And then there's procedural textures, bitmap textures, etc. And then there's CSG and NURBs. We encountered this in InterChange when we considered the Real 3D file format. Yes, they document it, although the file format seemed to change with every minor release. It included CSG obejcts as well as Boolean operations between them, as well as polygons and splines. So we could relatively easily export a Real 3D object composed of only polygons – except every beta tester we talked to said that they avoided polygons because Real 3D's renderer wasn't optimized for them. And when we examined the conversion of Real 3D models to other formats, overlooking the CSG and Boolean nightmares, even if we tesselated their splines and patches into polygons, the polygon-count goes through the roof – easily tens of thousands of triangles for simple objects. So, speaking of documenting file formats, we do have code in-house for the old 3DGF format. If I remember correctly, we stalled because we couldn't get the documentation for your scene file format that linked together all the separate 3DGF files. At one point, Macromedia techs were recommending that we call Knowledge Revolution, who had reverse-engineered the scene file format. What's new in the world of Macromedia, and how can we improve the support for your company's products in InterChange? 🙂