java3d to be opensourced

[William Denniss]

xith is a 765Kb compressed jar (1580Kb uncompressed jar)
and needs jogl which is a 552kb compressed jar (1437kb decompressed jar)  and 472kb  dll on windows. add joal to have sound and it make 90more kb.
that makes 765 + 552 + 472 +90 = 1879 kb compressed or 3579 Kb uncompressed.
Note: did not count vecmath.jar, as i did not knew if it was used.

java3d is 4 jars that are installed uncompressed (for performance reasons) of 5005  Kb (2616kb compressed) and two dlls that are 224kb.
note: j3daudio.jar includes a 1.1mb gm soundbank...
that makes 2816kb compressed and  5229 kb uncompressed.

It is not that big for both, and a difference of 1073kb...
if you remove the soundbank, j3d and xith have almost the same size..  Xiith is only 5kb smaller if soundbank is compressed and bigger of 80Kb if we remove the sounbank uncompressed....
While xith  has more up to date features, it is way less complete globally than j3d. thus, we can say that feature wise, j3d is way smaller than xith.

Tell me if i forgot a file, somewhere...

Pepe - please read my recent research into Xith3D file sizes.  As you will see - Xith3D can be significantly smaller if you want.

Both Xith3D and Java3D use vecmath.jar (although different implementations).

Also - don't forget to compress your DLL files if you want a true comparison.  Also - using BZip2 (eg. in an NSIS installer) gives you better compression again although both would be effected more or less equally.

Will.

[pepe]

As I already said, we did not optimize for size. Throwing out the debugging and the demos would definitely reduce the size of Xith3D and possibly you can throw out more Xith3D packages, if you don't use them.

throwing debugging info would be a regression, imho. Removing them means that you will pass huge time to correct bugs on your user's reports, and be back to the old time of C. throwing out demos, however, is a good idea.

What you are basically trying to say in this thread is that we should stop developing Xith3D and move to Sun's Java3D.

Somewhat, but that's not what is important in that thread. I have an opinion, and i am asking for yours.  I'm aware that people will not want to drop developing xith, and i think that this is madness in the actual situation. I might be wrong, and i want you to give me your points so i can understand them. Discussing each other's point to extract only objective ones is important to me as it gives me the possibility to eventually change my mind. A reductiion of all that might be "i don't understand why, convince me, but don't expect me to just listen"

1. So far there is only an announcement, Java3D 1.4 is not yet out and Open Source. You are assuming that the disadvantages of Java3D will vanish, but currently we don't know exactly what will happen. Don't know if it makes sense to try to somehow get involved in the JCP. (I won't do it.)

MMhhhh. aren't you secretly assuming the opposite? We don't know for sure, but we both have a position. I am optimistic and prefer assuming good things will happen and try to help in that.

2. Xith3D's structure is already different to Java3D. The scenegraph is basically the same. Sound, rendering, loaders, physics are different. Xith3D is not thread safe and uses only floats. I don't know if you are aware of that, because I never saw any posts of you in the Xith3D forum.

Wow that's nasty... well, i hope for you that 99% of your users never drop a word on forums as i do. If not you're actually wasting your time on an api used by... mhh ... 20 to 30 persons..... better do something else..

3. You are seeing Xith3D as a duplicate effort. Currently it's the other way round. Sun has the bad habit of letting others do the work and then coming up with their own implementations without communicating or respecting the work others have done.

Well, actually, Xith came with their own implementation of java 3D. If there is a competition, i see it there. they do, you 'rip', then you think they will rip what you did, but you will rip what you did not implement or document..... bla bla bla endlessly....
childish imho...

4. Xith3D is truely Open Source. Questions, bug reports, patches, tutorials, new developers are very welcome. It's not clear if this will be valid for Java3D.

Except for patches, that is also welcome for any closed source API.

I agree with Adam, that we have to wait at least some months until we can draw conclusions.

For this, i partially agree. I'll wait for things to really begin in order to draw conclusions.

[pepe]

Pepe - please read my recent research into Xith3D file sizes.  As you will see - Xith3D can be significantly smaller if you want.

Both Xith3D and Java3D use vecmath.jar (although different implementations).

Also - don't forget to compress your DLL files if you want a true comparison.  Also - using BZip2 (eg. in an NSIS installer) gives you better compression again although both would be effected more or less equally.

Will.

You don't have to compress to compare. you can compare anything, once they are of the same type. Actually, the question was how was xith compared to J3D. J3D has to be the basis, as it can't change.  Nevertheless, i did the comparisons of both compressed and uncompressed jars to be fair and clearly understandable.
i post the rest in your thread.

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[Jens]

Somewhat, but that's not what is important in that thread. I have an opinion, and i am asking for yours.  I'm aware that people will not want to drop developing xith, and i think that this is madness in the actual situation.

Is it madness that people want to drop it or that people don't want to drop it?

MMhhhh. aren't you secretly assuming the opposite? We don't know for sure, but we both have a position. I am optimistic and prefer assuming good things will happen and try to help in that.

No matter what position we have, we can't look into the future.

Wow that's nasty... well, i hope for you that 99% of your users never drop a word on forums as i do. If not you're actually wasting your time on an api used by... mhh ... 20 to 30 persons..... better do something else..

I just wasn't sure if you are aware that there are already major differences between Xith3D and Java3D. It's indeed some kind of strange, that the first thing the community in this forum hears from you is a request to drop Xith3D, but I didn't intend to offense you. It's of course OK to stay in silent-mode and I do this quite often myself in other lists.

Well, actually, Xith came with their own implementation of java 3D. If there is a competition, i see it there. they do, you 'rip', then you think they will rip what you did, but you will rip what you did not implement or document..... bla bla bla endlessly....
childish imho...

The first 'rip' was for a good reason: Java3D seemed not be supported anymore, but a lot of developers were used to its scenegraph structure. I'm not sure, if they will rip what the Xith3D people did. Probably this won't be the case, because there isn't much communication (I know of). Yes, I'm aware this all isn't perfect, but I can't imaginge an easy solution, based on the information, which is currently available.

The fact that many people considered Java3D dead, created a new "market" for Java 3D (scenegraph) APIs. Today there is not only Java3D and Xith3D, but also jME, OpenMind, Jist3D and probably others. There will be duplicate effort between these projects.

For this, i partially agree. I'll wait for things to really begin in order to draw conclusions.

Let's keep the topic in mind, so we can come back to it, when we have new information.

[William Denniss]

pepe, I see that you are convinced that Java3D will evolve into an API that will exactly fit your needs.  I hope for your sake that it will, and do so in a timely fashion.

When Xith3D was designed - many of the good featres and ideas of Java3D were encorporated, and the API was made to be similar to ease porting.

Xith3D is not, never was and never will be an attempt to recreate Java3D.   There are many fundimental differences between the two API's which will widen over time.

I have suggested to you before, and I shall do so again - review both API's based on their technical merits and choose the one which best suites your needs.

Personally I will be saying with Xith3D as I feel that it has more innovative potential, is a current solution rather than a proposal, and after reviewing both API's I have found that it is better suited to my needs.

Will.

[William Denniss]

You don't have to compress to compare. you can compare anything, once they are of the same type. Actually, the question was how was xith compared to J3D. J3D has to be the basis, as it can't change.  Nevertheless, i did the comparisons of both compressed and uncompressed jars to be fair and clearly understandable.
i post the rest in your thread.

You are correct in that you can compare anything once they are of the same type - however in this case they are not of the same type.  No two files of the exact same size (unless they are the same file) will have the same amount of compression.

A good example is word files - you could have a 300K file and a 30K file which both compress to the same size (I have seen this).

As we are talking about distribution size rather than installed size - the most accurate comparison would be to compress both libraries up (including native libraries!) using a good packaging software (eg. NSIS using BZip2).

Regarding debugging information, I think it is up to the distributor to decide if including it would be benificial don't you think?  If you know your customers can't submit a stack trace or if you don't care if they do - then there is little need for debugging info.  Most production code people use on a day to day basis doesn't have this information (I can name several commercial games which have crashed without any useful information that I could relay to the developers and even it did and I tried to submit it, I would most likely be ignored anyway).  The reason I provided BOTH sizes (with debugging and without) is to illustrate the choice and the trade offs.

Will.

[dtwilleager]

Hey guys - I've been meaning to check in, but GDC got in the way.  Java 3D and Xith3D can co-exist with no problem.  Xith3D has a focus on games, and some non-games applications can take advantage of the things that it has.  There is also a very large Java 3D development community that doesn't make games.  Because of Java 3D's asynchronous multithreaded design, it fits very will into visualization systems.  It's focus is not likely to change because of its large visualization installed base.  So, having a games focused scene graph is a good thing.  There are lots of non-games Java 3D developers that are very excited about the prospect of helping to develop it.  The feedback has been awesome.

Also, it is unlikely that you will be able to directly use Java 3D code.  There is the license issue.  And, I think you will be suprised to find how different the code is than you might think.  It was designed for highly scalable multi-screen visual systems, so not much of the code will meet your needs anyways.

So don't worry.  Our intention is not to take over all scene graphs.  We are just trying to help our Java 3D developers who want to see it evolve and thrive.

Doug.

[Jens]

Hello Doug,

nice to hear a statement from you. It describes the situation pretty good. Does "license issue" mean that Java3D won't be released under a BSD license?

Btw. for visualization systems, there is also the Aviatrix3D project (http://aviatrix3d.j3d.org/). I think there are currently quite a number of scenegraphs out there and it's hard to predict the future of them.

Jens

[shawnkendall]

Cross-post
"Official Announcement"
Jist3D as a rendering engine is no longer being developed.

http://www.java-gaming.org/cgi-bin/JGNetForums/YaBB.cgi?board=jogl;action=display;num=1069188165