Tools Team End-of-Quarter document

Summary of Significant Accomplishments for the Quarter

• Completed 3DSMax tools requested by Architecture department.

  At the end of last quarter the tools developed for the Architecture department still required some more work to complete. Finishing this work was our first priority this quarter and was delivered according to the schedule set the first week this quarter.

• Designed a strong system to allow concurrent modelling of 3D worlds

  We delivered a solid design for a system to allow multiple individuals to concurrently edit VRMidtown worlds. The system lets user view the entire world in Alias/Wavefront, checkout individual objects, edit these objects, commit the changes, and finally relinquish control of the object.

• Implementation of concurrent modelling system. We implemented the concurrent modelling system as a C++ plugin for Alias/Wavefront using MySQL as the database to store metafile information. Unfortunately our implementation is not yet complete (see below).

Problems Encountered this Quarter

• Limited information on the Alias/Wavefront API

  The information we had on the Alias API was limited to the HTML help files packaged with Alias. As these were extensive (and required a machine running a webserver to be searchable), we had to spend too much time searching for information hidden deep in the files. This problem was solved by the brute force approach of simply spending the time required to dig the information out.

• Inability to compile MySQL to be compatabile with our Alias plugin.

  Due to incompatibilities between application compile as -o32 and -n32 we have been unable to use or test the entire system. This problem as yet is unresolved and will require either more research and testing to compile MySQL, adoption of some other compatible database system, or creation of a simpler program to fulfill the role we had planned for MySQL.

• Update of the Editor Project after Spring Quarter 1999