"Ben Houston" <ben@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> I understand that some of the companies (ie. TGS) that have licensed
> OpenInventor [...]
I believe TGS is the only company to do so, but the SGI employees can
probably give you a definitive answer to this.
The other "Open Inventors" out there are API clones, i.e. clean-room
implementations _not_ using any of the original SGI Open Inventor
sourcecode.
> and ported it to other platforms have implemented or changed things
> that speed up the performance and added features. Is this true?
TGS have made various additions, yes. I don't think they've made any
significant performance improvements, though, the major bulk of that
work happened by the original SGI team between Inventor version 1 and
version 2, as far as I can remember -- Inventor v1 was dead slow,
while v2 is actually pretty good IMHO, considering the main targets of
the library (optimizing for programmer speed, maximum flexibility).
> If so what changes/additions have they made to the library?
Off the top of my head:
* VRML2 support
* Large Model Viewing
* Volume Rendering
* Collision detection
* SoWin interface library for gluing Inventor to Win32
* IVF interface library for gluing Inventor to MFC
* plus various odds and ends
I believe some of these extensions are "extras", though, in the sense
that you have to pay TGS extra licensing and royalty fees in addition
to what you payed for the "base" package.
> Also how hard would it be to reimplement these changes in the open
> source version of OpenInventor?
Well... YMMV. :^}
> Does the Coin implementation have these features [...]
Only a few minor things from the TGS set of extensions; the
SoMarkerSet node, the SoClipPlaneManip manipulator, a partial SoWin
library, plus miscellaneous other stuff I can't remember off the top
of my head.
Plus some extras by our own; a movietexture node, additional
So*-libraries (most notably SoQt and SoGtk), a Linux joystick device
driver, etc.
> [and] performance increases?
Not yet. ;^)
(BTW, I think the SGI guys would be happier if you bring Coin-specific
questions to one of the Coin mailinglists.)
Regards,
Morten
(Coin developer)
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