Just so. I'm really curious about some of the projects to create
virtual cities and stuff with VRML 1.0 -- it seems to me that these
are necessarily going to be *huge* files (if they are done as a single
.wrl), or a little clunky to move around in (if they are in multiple).
I see using "portal walls" as the right way to do this -- have, say,
each block be a single .wrl, with full-size portals at the ends, and
let the more powerful browsers (and better Net connections) pull in
stuff down the street as they have time. Modular cities...
>I think the web as it is now is a good answer to how things will go. The
>commercial sites which need to allow people to find them will become ordered and
>very structured. The non-commercial sites will generally be unordered with
>endless tricks of navigation and unexpected twists - the wilds of the VRML
>world...
That's essentially my expectation as well. There will always be demand
for order in some quarters, fluidity in others. Best, I think, to work
with a model that permits fluidity, and which orderly worlds can be
built on top of...
Gonz writes:
>This has the problem, that different VRML worlds linked together and displayed
>simultaniously need not make topological sense.
True, but so what? They *can* make topological sense. It's the
responsibility of the world designers to make their links work
well. Some won't -- those connections will be confusing, and won't
get used much. We need to decide how to cope with strange situations
(or, at least, the browser designers have to), but we don't
necessarily need to strictly avoid them...
So long as the real world *can* be modeled, though, I don't see
any reason to limit ourselves to it...
>It is a good idea to display unchosen links as darkness, but why not load the
>world in advance as the user get only near to it? That would give him
>something like a preview.
I've been assuming that it's a browser issue. The strength of portals
is that the Browser *can* do preloads; indeed, that's the primary reason
for the proposal. (What I don't like about WWWAnchor is that it makes
worlds too "discrete".) But not every browser will do so; it depends,
as I said, on browser capability and line speed. It's essentially
analagous to the image-loading issue with HTML -- most people go for
full image loading as the norm, but people with slow lines often
choose not to...
-- Justin
Random Quote du Jour:
Re: You Know You're in the SCA When...
"....the tunes you unconsciously hum are in Latin...."
-- Cailfind ingen Grainne