Flux Player

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Flux Player 2.0 Developer Documentation

Flux Player conforms to the X3D standard, including several profiles (subets) used for different applications: the Interchange Profile, the Interactive Profile and the Immersive Profile. Flux Player also maintains a high degree of compatibility with VRML97.

  • it will read and accept well-formed X3D files
  • it will read and accept well-formed VRML97 files
  • it will be able to display most VRML97 files
  • it will interpret most VRML97 Script content without the need for modification; however it is recommended that script writers migrate to the X3D Scene Access Interface, which is the primary scripting interface for X3D
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X3D Features Supported

  • Humanoid Animation Component (H-Anim), including single-mesh (skinned) avatars
  • Limited NURBS support (NurbsPatchSurface, NurbsSurfaceInterpolator, NurbsTextureCoordinate nodes)
  • Immersive Profile (full support)
  • PROFILE and COMPONENT keywords (not strictly enforced)
  • XML Encoding
  • VRML97 Encoding
  • LoadSensor node
  • MultiTexture nodes, including Spherical Environment maps
  • Cubic environment maps
  • KeyboardSensor and StringSensor nodes
  • TriangleFanSet, TriangleSet, TriangleStripSet nodes, and Indexed- versions
  • Event Utilities nodes
  • PositionInterpolator2D and CoordinateInterpolator2D nodes
  • External Scene Access Interface with ECMAScript and COM bindings (full support)
  • Internal Scene Access Interface with ECMAScript
  • MP3 audio
  • Streaming playback of MP3 audio, WMV, AVI and MPEG video/audio
  • 2D and 3D Layers
  • Extruded 3D Text
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User Interface

Flux Player provides a simple dashboard interface for navigation that should be familiar to users of 3D viewer products. The Flux dashboard may be hidden using object tag parameters as described below.

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Navigation Modes

Explore Mode - Used for X3D WALK or FLY navigation modes.

  • Left mouse button - Activates a move. Drag the pointer in the scene window to move in the world. Drag up to move forward, drag down to move backward, drag left to turn left, and drag right to turn right. Your view moves in the direction of travel. Hold down Shift key to move faster.
  • Middle mouse button - Tilts the view. Drag to look up and down or from side to side without moving.
  • Right mouse button - Activates a pan movement. Drag to pan straight up or down, or to slide right or left. Pan does not turn your view in the direction of travel. Hold down Shift key to pan faster. Click and release the right mouse button without dragging to drop down a context menu with all of the same commands as in the dashboard (see below).

Examine Mode - Used for X3D EXAMINE navigation mode.

  • Left mouse button - Activates a rotation. Drag to rotate an object in front of the user about the center of rotation.
  • Middle mouse button - Activates a zoom. Drag up to zoom in or drag down to zoom out.
  • Right mouse button - Activates a pan movement. Drag to pan straight up or down, or to slide right or left. Pan does not turn your view in the direction of travel.

Command Buttons

  • Seek - Click the Seek control and then click an object in the Flux window to go directly to it. The pointer should change to indicate a seek operation is being expected by Flux when the Seek control is clicked.
  • Straighten - (Not implemented in this build) Click to place the user's view upright and level in the world.
  • Undo - Click to move back to the last view location.
  • Redo - Click to move forward to the last undone view location.

Viewpoint Controls

  • Viewpoints List - Click to display a list of interesting places in the world.
  • Next Viewpoint - Click a control to go to the next viewpoint in the Viewpoint list.
  • Previous Viewpoint - Click a control to go to the previous viewpoint in the Viewpoint list.

Other Controls

  • Info - Opens the Flux console to display Flux status messages and user printing output.
  • Preferences - (Not implemented in this beta) Allows the user to set options for Flux behavior.
  • Help - Provides help options

. Keyboard

  • Arrow keys - Left, right, up and down keys can be used to move through the world in MOVE mode or to rotate the model in ROTATE mode.
  • Space bar - Cycles through the entries in the Viewpoints list. Page Up/Page Down keys currently not supported but will be in the next release.

. Right-mouse Menu

  • The Flux right mouse menu contains all of the same commands as the dashboard. Click and release the right mouse button without dragging to initiate this menu. Bugnote: Please note that the menu accelerator keys do not work in this build (relase 2.0, build 633).
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Customizing Flux

You can customize Flux Player's operation using object tag PARAM values within your web page. The following PARAM values are supported in this release:

Parameter Name Description
Src URL specifying source file. Relative URLs supported.
BgColor RGB color value in hexidecimal format. Specifies background color of scene if no Background node is present. Default is "0x000000"
AntiAlias TRUE/FALSE value specifying whether to use hardware antialiasing. Default is TRUE.
Dashboard TRUE/FALSE value specifying whether to display the Flux navigation dashboard interface. Default is TRUE.
PrimitiveQuality Specifies quality of tesselation for Cone, Cylinder and Sphere nodes. Allowable values are Good, Better, and Best. In the current build Better and Best are equivalent.
MaxTextureSize Limit textures to this size in each dimension. A zero value means do not limit texture sizes, or use the largest size supported by the graphics driver. Default is 512.
RightMouseMenu Control operation of the right mouse popup menu. Allowable values are None, Short, and Full. None suppresses right mouse menu operation. Short presents only the Help menu. Full presents the entire right mouse menu. Default is Full.
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File Extensions and MIME Types

Flux registers associations for the following file extensions and MIME types:

  • .x3d, x3dv,.x3d.gz, and .x3dv.gz
  • model/x3d, model/x3d+xml, model/x3d-vrml, x-world/x-x3d, x-world/x-x3d+xml, x-world/x-x3d-vrml

Note that Flux does not register associations for VRML file extensions and MIME types (.wrl, .wrl.gz, model/vrml and x-world/x-vrml). Flux may be used to view these file types by explicitly referencing the Flux control using an OBJECT tag and the classid attribute. The following example embeds the file somefile.wrl in a web page and uses the Flux Active X control's CLSID to invoke Flux player to view the VRML file.

<object classid="clsid:918B202D-8E8F-4649-A70B-E9B178FEDC58">
<PARAM NAME="SRC" VALUE="media\somefile.wrl">
</object>

Note that most web servers do not yet have support for the new x3d MIME types. If you are unable to get your web browser to launch Flux to view x3d files delivered from a web server, embed them in an HTML page with the OBJECT tag and classid attribute as described above, or if you don't wish to put an explicit reference to the Flux ActiveX control in your content, use an EMBED tag as in the following example:

<embed src="somefile.x3d" width="300" height="300" BgColor="0xaaaaaa" Dashboard="FALSE"/>

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Known Problems

The following is a list of known bugs and problems with Flux Player. We will attempt to fix these in upcoming builds.

  • Collision still seems a little buggy.
  • Matrox and SiS graphics chipsets are known to have problems
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Supported Platforms

Flux Player has been designed for Windows 98/Me, Windows XP and Windows 2000 with DirectX 8 or higher. It has been tested extensively under Windows 98/Me and XP, minimally under Windows 2000.

Flux Player runs as an ActiveX control within Internet Explorer and other ActiveX containers. It also runs as a native FireFox plugin.

It has been tested on several graphics chips, including nVidia GeForce series and ATI Raydeon series.

Please check our web site frequently for updates and changes to this documentation.

Retrieved from "http://wiki.mediamachines.com/index.php/Flux_Player"
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