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FreeWRL Home Page
Welcome to the FreeWRL web pages.
DISCLAIMER: All information and programs
presented on these pages is presented strictly on an as-is basis without
an explicit or implicit warranty or guarantee of any kind, not even
for fitness for any particular purpose. The FreeWRL logo is based
on the Linux Penguin logo by Larry Ewing. All trademarks are owned
by their respective owners.
FreeWRL is an open-source(R)
VRML
browser written by Tuomas J. Lukka, John Stewart and others,
placed under the Gnu Library General Public License.
It is written particularly
on/for Linux but runs also under other Unix operating systems
(e.g. Irix, OSF, Solaris) with little trouble. For the current version,
see the news page. For release history,
see the file README.
If you use FreeWRL in an interesting project, drop John Stewart a note (and a
link if possible).
Latest
Newest news (for the previous items, see the news page)
14.June.1999 -- 0.20alpha1 is out! EAI is pretty good now, still a few
bugs to work on.
18.May.1999 -- 0.19beta2 should be released soon. I have been working on
EAI code, and fixing some minor bugs. The EAI code and SHARED VIRTUAL WORLDS should work
100% soon...
23.Mar.1999 -- 0.19 is out. Great gains in EAI, some documentation updates.
Features
FreeWRL is currently still in alpha stage but has several interesting
features:
A Descent(tm)-like FLY mode with full 6 degrees of freedom
(with 12 keys to control movement).
A programmatic interface enabling you to make scripts to take
snapshots of the world at specific times and places, e.g. for making
a movie for non-VRML-enabled people.
Script node support for both Java and Javascript (as well as Perl)
TrueType(tm) font support using the
FreeType library
OpenGL rendering (on Linux
using the
Mesa
library)
-- which means hardware accelerated rendering on many systems.
Open, pluggable framework -- the browser, event model, backend and
script engines can all be easily replaced with code to handle new interfaces,
e.g. binary VRML, other 3D library interfaces, new scripting languages,
whatever.
Support for most nodes, PROTOs (with events), and Inlines
Written mostly in Perl,
allowing fast prototyping of possible
extensions as well as concise code. (Which other language would
enable one person to write a nearly complete browser in just a couple
of months in his spare time?)
Support for XSwallow for embedding into Netscape (see the screenshot)
Downsides
For fairness sake, here is the list of current downsides, which I hope to eradicate
as soon as possible:
Some nodes and features are currently only partially implemented
-- You can help me. Report the nodes and features
I haven't yet completely implemented and you
need right now -- or even send a patch
Uses external libraries which you may have to compile separately
(JPEG, FreeType)
No binary distributions yet
Incomplete EAI implementation (work is in progress)
Contact
If you want to help, please email John Stewart
at John.Stewart@crc.ca.
If you want to get email when I release a new version, please mail
me to be added to the list.
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