If we want to eventually support interactivty and malleable worlds
we need to eventually put some "programming-like" features into VRML
But there is no way that complex objects are going to be handwritten
These are going to be churned out by autocad, 3DStudio, and VRMLCAD...
So I see VRML documents eventually being a series of documents..
one to cover the general behaviour and layout of the world.. This
document would then refer to several other files containing information
about objects in the world.
I would like to create my worlds by building the objects with an authoring
tool, and then hand-writing a VRML document to use those objects
in my world, and to describe the physics of my world...
SO I would like VRML CAD to output a compact binary with named objects,
a few of them with parameter slots I could plug stuff into..
Example: I pull up VRMLCAD and make a spiffy Eiffel Tower... name it
EiffelT and name a few parameters of it by clicking on them... I
call its elevator "elev" and I name differant properties of the
elevator such as its color which I call "color"
So in my main world file I do the following:
WWWInline {name "Eiffel_Tower.wrl"}
SET {child "EiffelT.elev.color" value [.5 .2 .7]}
USE EiffelT
Or something of that ilk....
To get there I propose we set up a simple, elegant, and flexible
system for naming nodes, their children, et al....
Then let the authors of the authoring tools loose and see how much
they can take advantage of this....
Comments?