Ajax3D experiment: Learning X3D
One of the problems with X3D is how little useful information there is on how to use it. There is the occasional tutorial, blog entry or forum post which is relevant to what you want to know, but beyond this it seems to come down to blind experimentation. With plugins which also support Firefox but tend to be very crash prone in it. Or largely undocumented editing studios.
Now X3D is a standard and it does have specifications which you can browse and download, but in my experience they tend to have their own accessibility issues. Designed using frames and not available in a form conducive to either printing or looking up items of interest, what you really need is for them to be available in other more accessible forms. Like PDF. Unfortunately they are not.. well, actually they are available to some definition of the word. You can pay an extortionately high price to get a PDF of at least the main specification from ISO:
230 CHF? That's around 270 $NZ in real money. Or 11000 ISK in not so real money. It'd almost be worth my time for that price to write a Python script to reformat the frame based HTML.
On the bright side however, www.web3d.org does provide zipped versions of the HTML for download. And I may refer to a few problems with Media Machines' plugin and editing studio in my initial paragraph, but they are both very capable and free and still my X3D tools of choice.
Could I prod you in the direction of my project, also called Ajax 3d, which supports simple 3d graphics using the canvas tag.
ReplyDeleteNot much use in IE, and limited to rather simple scenes I'm afraid. Still, it's open source and has a bit of sample code to get you going.
Just to be clear, Ajax3D is not the name of my project, but rather something aimed at forwarding the use of Ajax and X3D together. Which happens to be what I am doing.
ReplyDeleteI saw your project on Reddit yesterday. It looks pretty good both code-wise and as a remake of Virus.
In fact, as I played it and looked at the code I couldn't help but think that it would be so much less effort than trying to learn X3D. And I would get that swanky polygon look which works so well in Virus and the other games which also use it.
Nice work :-) Will be interesting to see what else you come up with.
Ajax 3D (canvas tag thing) does not work in Safari? Why not? Also see www.ajax3d.org. You would not have to learn much X3D to work with it at all. I know, I have.
ReplyDelete