M> I believe that the general feeling is that objects are things, which have
M> properties, shapes and now behaviors. But there is a substantial group
M> focussed on Open-Inventor where the objects are nodes in a scene graph.
M> I'd be interested in hearing other people's ideas on this?
Our rule-based visualization system has its own language for specifying
the production of objects and how they change over time, and I found
while translating these objects into Open Inventor that the kind of
"higher-level objects" being discussed here helped reduce complexity
by quite a bit. I could more easily make use of polymorphism for
setting properties that different object types had in common, since I
knew exactly where to put the corresponding node in the high-level
object's scene graph representation. For me, this was just a coding
convention. I don't see any need to change the 1.0 VRML spec.
However, when behaviors are introduced, this kind of scheme does
provide a nice way to tell the browser that "these attributes might
change, but go ahsad and optimize the rest of them into your internal
representation." It might be a good way to trade off update flexibility
with rendering speed.
-- Pete McCann[email protected] Department of Computer Sciencehttp://swarm.wustl.edu/~mccap/ Washington University in St. Louis