==== From: Marc de Groot [SMTP:postmaster@immersive.com] Sent: Sunday, June 14, 1998 12:55 PM To: Hopkins, Don Subject: So... ...should I send you the source to CForth-83? Also, I'd love to show you what I've been working on. As you probably remember, I have a Snow Crash-style VR system for the Internet that's Forth-based. It works great, and now that VRML has lost some of its lustre, I'm getting another chance. Woo-wee! ^M Marc de Groot Immersive Systems, Inc. San Francisco "The truth is, most people don't know what to do with a computer. They consider running an operating system to be a substitute for doing useful work." -Chuck Moore ==== From: Hopkins, Don [mailto:Hopkins, Don] Sent: Wednesday, June 17, 1998 12:12 PM To: postmaster@immersive.com Cc: wmb@firmworks.com; dhopkins@maxis.com Subject: RE: So... I would really appreciate your version of CForth, thanks a lot! I'd love to see a demo of your stuff. Is it available for download somewhere? Is there a net of people using it I could hook into? Where are you these days? I just moved to Oakland near the Rockridge Bart station, and got a nice PC and great couple of kittens! I share your low opinion of VRML, but haven't been following it recently. How would you say it's losing its lustre? I'd love to know your point of view! Did it ever really luster, or was it just a shiney layer of snot? I didn't expect it go anywhere but I'd love to know if my theories were accurate. Last I heard, its self proclaimed "God" Mark Pesche was writing anti-XML diatribes, based on the idea that if Microsoft likes it it must be evil, and totally missing and mis-stating the point of XML (getting it totally backwards, and then proceeding from there, squealing about how we all have to rally against XML in order to stop Microsoft. Uuuuuh, yeah. XML is a damn good idea, the core of which has been around since before Pesche was in elementary school. He attacked it as "The Revenge of the 40-Somethings", but I think that's a wonderful complement and totally sums up why everybody *SHOULD* use XML.) Once I told him that if he thought VRML had anything to do with VR, he was totally trivializing the problem. It might be OK to call it "3DML", but space-time is 4D, and you don't just go nailing something like Time onto the side of version 2, and even then, it still doesn't solve any of the interesting problem, it just gets in your way. I've been hacking 3D Studio Max of late. It's a 3D authoring system that's totally extensible via a really robust plug-in API that lots of people have done amazing things with [like Biped and HyperMatter]. The latest version of 3D Studio Max R2 comes with a plug-in scripting language called "MaxScript", written by John Wainwright, the architect of ScriptX. I worked with him on ScriptX at Kaleida, and I really like John's taste in language design. ScriptX is kind of like Dylan or Scheme with fewer parens and some fancy OO multimedia class libraries that leave Java in the dust [can Java even play a quicktime movie on both the Mac and Windows yet?]. MaxScript is a simpler language than ScriptX, but with some nice constructs for programming and animating stuff in Max. It has a nice plug-in facility of its own that lets you extend it with primitives via DLL's, call back into the language and Max, etc. That's right, a plug-in with plug-ins of its own! I'm working with Will Wright on his next game, "The Sims" [he wrote SimCity]. It's kind of like a 3d version of Little Computer People, where you build and furnish a house in which a simulated family lives. I wrote a character animation library to mix skeletal animation (kind of like a multi track sound mixer, but with a track per bone, composing 4d quaternion rotations and 3d translations instead of 1d amplitudes, that can cross fade from a walk to a stand for a smooth transition, etc), plus a content pipeline to get animations out of 3D Studio Max and into the game, a module to walk people along paths by sequencing and blending animations, positioning the body so the feet don't slide, etc, etc, etc... VRML solves none of my problems and nobody in the game industry takes it at all seriously (or Java either). -Don ====