Why have VBO capabilities been added so lately?

installation is smooth enought and web integration is smart on http://www.shapeways.com  but one thing is disturbing : the security dialog appear a little strange (see image above), the editor is "Unknow" and the name is not really meaningfull "org.jdesktop.applet.util.JNLPAppletLauncher"

DzzD,

Yes, we're aware of that issue. The Shapeways site is in Beta, and so they have not yet acquired a commercial-grade code-signing certificate. As such, it is using a self-signed certificate from us right now. We expect that this situation will be changed around January 2009.

goussej,

I don't know about the TextRenderer bug. We do our own text management and polygon generation for the shapeways site. What we have internally to AV3D is a couple of simple checks - first to see whether VBO's are available and then a method call and catch for the GLException generated if they don't really exist. The VBO problem is symptomatic of a larger problem within JOGL of the way it does some version checking and capability checking right in the heart of the codebase. We've analysed this in the past and sent the results to Ken, but he disagrees that it is a problem. So, there is really nothing that we can do about it right now - so we just catch the exceptions and fall back to normal vertex arrays. There is significant changes to JOGL coming with the post OGL 2.0 pipeline infrastructure so hopefully that will fix those problems as a byproduct.

Well, there's nowhere else to post about it apart from OpenGL.org forums  There is a sad lack of any other non-gaming Java forum for 3D graphics, so here is where we post about our occasional updates.

Like all toolkits, it's up to the end users to decide what they want to do with it. Yes, you could develop games with AV3D, but our primary development goals do not optimise for that path. As our company mostly does military, medical and scientific visualisation, as well as commercial applicaitons (see Shapeways), we make sure the toolkit is well suited to handle those tasks.

That said, there is nothing stopping someone from developing a game engine on top of it. It is just a scene graph after all. My current work is making sure that all the existing multipass techniques work. Some deficiencies are being worked on right now, and once those are corrected (for a 2.1 release), then all of the current, and hopefully future, GL coding strategies will be possbile within the AV3D API environment.