Bingo! You've hit the nail on the head. Just like font
libraries, pretty soon things will come with many megabytes
of 'stuff' that hardly anyone uses. That's where the
redline.gif, gradientline.gif, shadedline.gif, came from. People
didn't like <hr>. Dito for redball.gif, blueball.gif,
greenball_with_shadow.gif, etc.
I do think there there needs to be some default structures
in VRML, it's just not default 'objects'. Thus, a room,
a door, etc. should have some kind of built in meaning???
We are presently working on a TinkerToy converter. You feed in
a (kludgy) text file describing the TinkerToy scene and you
get out a VRML description. Great for describing network
structure, 3D relationships, etc. You basically just
build a little text file telling which colored pegs to
put in which holes of which connectors. It figures out
(x,y,z) coordinates, rotations, translations, etc. You then
edit the VRML to assign WWW links to the nodes. We don't
do that automatically since we are really writing out
iv files instead of VRML.
Right now, we have 3 node types (the orange cylinder with
4 holes, the disk with 10 holes, and [almost] a sphere with
arbitrary hole locations) and 5 pegs (red,orange,green,blue,
and auto-calc length [yellow]). We thought about the
green plastic triangle leaf thingys but couldn't figure out
what they would be used for.
Scott
PS TinkerToy is a registered trademark of somebody. We are
using it without permission. Please don't sue...
--+---------------------------------------------------------+ |Scott D. Nelson B131 Rm2074 email:nelson18@llnl.gov | |Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory | |7000 East Ave., L-153 | |Livermore CA 94550 | +---------------------------------------------------------+