WebFX Plugin
for Netscape Navigator 3.0 Beta 4 & 5

What's in this ReadMe

• Thank You For Choosing WebFX!
• IMPORTANT! Netscape Navigator 2.0 Caveats
• Notes About This Beta Release
• Installation
• Running WebFX
• WebFX Extensions
• Cool Content
• Configuring WebFX for Optimum Performance
• WebFX Navigation
• Technical Support

Thanks for choosing WebFX, the fastest VRML viewer on the internet and the first to work as a plugin for Netscape Navigator. We realize you have a choice in VRML viewers and we will continue to do our absolute best to provide you with distinctive advantages in design, performance, and quality.

The WebFX Plugin lets you fly through inter-connected three dimensional worlds on the internet complete with all the safety and comforts of Navigator. WebFX provides full VRML 1.0 compliance, progressive rendering, physics based navigation, collision detection, animated viewpoints, gzip support, level of detail, GIF, JPG, RGB, PNG, and BMP textures, multiply nested inlines, 3D text, sprites, image backgrounds, and support for common Open Inventor nodes so you can view as many 3D files on the internet as possible.

Check Our Website For The Latest Release of WebFX!

This version of WebFX is configured for Netscape 2.0 Beta 4/5. Because WebFX is tightly integrated with Navigator, you may have difficulty using this release of WebFX with earlier or later versions of Netscape Navigator. It is STRONGLY RECOMMENDED that you download the latest Netscape Navigator 2.0 release along with the latest WebFX release.

Netscape Navigator is in beta. Netscape's Java is in beta. WebFX is in beta. Are you starting to get the idea that things may be a little less than perfect? Don't worry. Things are not all that bad. Here are the main issues you need to be aware of:

• When using Navigator's Frames feature in 16 bit Navigator with a WebFX view in one of the frames, things may not paint properly, especially when popping up a menu. This will be fixed in a future beta of Netscape Navigator.
• If you find a crash or a major bug which can be reproduced, please inform our support team as soon as possible by sending email to support@paperinc.com. PLEASE DO NOT POST TECHNICAL SUPPORT QUESTIONS TO THE VRML MAILING LIST.
• If you are using 16bit Netscape Navigator, be sure to use the 16bit WebFX release. Likewise, use the 32bit WebFX with the 32bit Netscape Navigator. Mixing 16 and 32 bit releases of WebFX and Netscape Navigator is obviously a bad idea and will result in a whole bunch of ugly error messages.
• There are problems when shutting down Netscape Navigator and WebFX in Windows 3.1. Occasionally, these problems will prevent you from starting Navigator and WebFX. If this occurs, you will need to restart Windows (or use your trusty DLL loader/unloader to remove npwfx16.dll and rwl.dll). This is a known bug in Netscape Navigator and should be fixed in the next beta.

Requirements:

• You must have at least a Windows 95, NT, or 3.1 PC with at least:
  • 486DX 33mhz (or a 486SX with a math coprocessor)
  • 8MB RAM
  • 256 colors
• Note: Some notebook computers use a 486 without a math coprocessor. If you have one of these notebooks and would like to use WebFX, you will need to install a separate math coprocessor. We have to have some way to do all that fun 3D floating point math ;)

New features:

• Separate 32 bit and 16 bit versions
• Full support for the Netscape Plugin API
• Support for Netscape's EMBED tag for embedding multiple WRLs in an HTML document
• Point navigation mode
• LOD support
• AsciiText support
• FontStyle support { size ONLY }
• AnnotationText support
• Sprites (axis aligned objects which always face you)
• Transparent GIF texture support
• JPG, PNG and RGB texture support
• Animated texture support for texture movies
• Animated viewpoints
• Image backgrounds (similar to QuickTimeVR)
• Improved navigation bar with the camera functions you need most often
• Panic (reset) button for when you get lost in three space
• Front, top, side views
• Optional, adjustable headlight
• Adaptive rendering based on hardware performance
• View, save, and print VRML source
• Full support for Netscape bookmarks
• Drag and drop VRML bookmarks onto your Windows 95 desktop

Improvements:

• *Way* more stable dude!
• Even faster
• Improved texture transformations and UV mapping
• Improved material colors
• Improved HUD
• Improved fly mode with realistic flight option
• Support for #anchors

Known bugs and unimplemented features in this beta:

• The WebFX window will cause that beautiful Netscape animation to look a little strange due to the war of the color palettes
• Netscape currently displays a harmless error messsage when retreiving GZIPed files, although WebFX should still come up and be able to uncompress the file properly
• WebFX does not yet display the status for downloading inlines
• You may have trouble running WebFX with WING. If you find that it crashes on the WING.DLL, you will need to uninstall WING. If you do not want to uninstall, you can get WebFX up and running quickly by temporarily renaming WING.DLL in your WINDOWS\SYSTEM directory to WING.OLD and then rebooting your system.
• There are known problems with default configurations of certain graphics cards when running RenderWare (our 3D graphics engine). If you are experiencing these problems, you may need to make one of the following changes to your windows configuration files:

  ATI Graphics Ultra Pro Mach 32 (Driver version 2.3):

  Edit the file "WIN.INI" in your Windows directory (normally
  "C:\WINDOWS"). Under the section labeled "[Mach]" add the line:
  DeviceBitmap=off
  
  NOTE: If there is a DeviceBitmaps=off entry, remove it.
  

  ATI Graphics Ultra Pro Mach 64 card:

  Edit the file "SYSTEM.INI" in your Windows directory (normally
  "C:\WINDOWS"). Under the section labeled "[Macx]" add the line:
  DeviceBitmap=off
  
  NOTE: If there is a DeviceBitmaps=off entry, remove it.
  

  Matrox MGA:

  Edit the file "SYSTEM.INI" in your Windows directory (normally
  "C:\WINDOWS"). Under the section labeled "[MGA.DRV]" add the line:
  DevBits=off
  

This release of WebFX supports the following VRML extensions:

• Animated Textures This release of WebFX supports animation of any supported image file format in the Texture2 node. The format of the Texture2 node remains the same, except that multiple images are combined into one *long* image (ie. each of the frames are stacked vertically). The height of the image must be an even multiple of the width, and the width should be a power of 2.
  For instance, let's say you have 4 images you would like to cycle thru on one of your objects, and that each image is 128x128 pixels. You need to create one large image which is 512x128 in size and supply this image as the URL for the Texture2 node.
  Check out MTV Cube or the X29 in the WebFX distribution.

• AnnotationText: This node is identical to ascii text, but the text always faces the viewer, regardless of orientation. This is achieved by adding the AxisAlignment node (described below) in front of the AsciiText node.
• AxisAlignment: This node forces all children objects to be aligned in the specified axes. Typical use is to turn Ascii Text into Annotation Text or arbitrary 3D objects into Sprites.

  Usage:
  
      AxisAlignment {
              fields [SFBitMask alignment]
              alignment ALIGNAXISXYZ  # Always face the Camera
      }
  
      AsciiText {
          string ["This text will always face me"]
      }
  

• BackgroundColor: Sets the background color of the scene. Colors are interpreted as RGB triplet ranging from 0.0 (black) to 1.0 (full intensity).

  Usage:
  	
      DEF BackgroundColor Info {
          string "1.0 0.0 0.0"	# Let's set the background to bright red
      }
  

• BackgroundImage: Sets the background image for the scene. There currently is a bug in how the background image follows the camera, which should be fixed in the next beta. .BMP, .RAS, .GIF and .JPG are all supported for this node.

  Usage:
  	
      DEF BackgroundImage Info {
          string "http://www.come.place/some.bmp"	  # URL of the image
      }
  

• Collision Detection: This node adds basic cube based collision detection to your scene. There are 2 nodes to be concerned with here. The first node turns collision detection on for the whole scene and the second node turns collision detecion on for any nodes which follow it.

  Usage:
  
      DEF CollisionDetection Info 
      {
          string  "TRUE"  # Turn on collision detection for the scene
      }
  
      CollisionDetection {
          fields [SFBool collision]
          collision    TRUE  # All nodes following this node would be collideable.
      }                  
  

• Sprite: This node basically creates a polygon that is always axis aligned with the Camera, with the specified URL texture mapped onto the polygon. This is an excellent node for representing 3D Objects such as trees/grass which are in the form of an image.

  Usage:
  
      Sprite {
  	fields [SFString texture]
  	texture "http://www.some.place/some.jpg"
      }
  

You'll want to check out two HTML pages in particular when running WebFX: Welcome.htm and Coolwrls.htm. Try our Welcome.htm page to get a nice summary of using WebFX as well as an example of embedded VRML. Also, try our Coolwrls.htm document to see a bunch of really cool VRML files locally and on the net. Both HTML documents are in the WebFX directory and are installed in your Windows 95 Start Menu.

Cool worlds you'll find in the webfx\vrml directory:

• Weather World is a great demonstration of our annotation text and texture mapping support.
• MTV Cube is a good demonstration of our animated texture support.
• Castle (Castle.wrl) is particularly interesting because of the way et makes use of multiply nested inlines to keep the file size small. Castle.wrl is also cool because it uses our collision detection VRML extension. Try it in walk mode with keyboard navigation and you'll swear that you're playing Doom.
• Crayola - To learn how to fly with WebFX, give Crayola.wrl a whirl. Collision detection is enabled for this file as well, although you might find it easier to fly if you turn it off using the WebFX main menu.
• House of Immersion, an excellent introduction to navigating in a VRML space.
• Logos, there's a Paper, Netscape, and VRML logo.

There are three navigation modes in WebFX: walk, fly, and point. To switch between modes, use the toolbar or right click to popup the WebFX main menu. You can use either the keyboard or mouse to navigate in each mode. If you're like us and you've racked up alot of mileage playing Doom or Descent, you'll be familiar with WebFX navigation. The Doom model is used when walking or authoring while the Descent model is used when flying.

• Walking

  Up/Down Arrows			Move forward/backward
  Left/Right Arrows		Turn left/right
  A/Z				Tilt head up/down
  J				Jump
  Mouse Left Drag			Move forward/backward or turn left/right
  Mouse Right Drag		Orbit about the entire scene
  Mouse Ctrl+Left Click		Automatically walk to the object you ctrl+clicked on
  Mouse Right Click		Popup the WebFX View menu
  
  Shift (w/ mouse or keys)	Move faster
  Alt (w/ mouse or keys)		Pan left/right or up/down
  Space				Open doors, manipulate objects
  Enter				Fires (only kidding...)
  

• Flying

  Up/Down Arrows 			Tilt up/down
  Left/Right Arrows		Turn left/right
  A/Z				Thrust forward/backward
  Q/E				Revolve counter-clockwise/clockwise
  Mouse Left Drag			Tilt up/down or turn left/right
  Mouse Right Drag		Orbit about the entire scene
  Mouse Ctrl+Left Click		Automatically fly to the object you ctrl+clicked on
  Mouse Right Click		Popup the WebFX View menu
  
  Shift (w/ mouse or keys)	Move faster
  Alt (w/ mouse or keys)		Pan left/right or up/down
  Space				Open doors, manipulate objects
  

• Pointing

  Keyboard			Same as walking
  Mouse Left Click		Animates you closer to the point you clicked on
  Mouse Left Drag			Move forward/backward or turn left/right
  Mouse Right Drag		Orbit about the point currently at the center of the screen
  Mouse Right Click		Popup the WebFX View menu
  

Please check our home page for a running list of known bugs. If you find anything we don't know about (especially crashes), it would be great if you could drop us a note. Thanks in advance.

Please DO NOT POST PROBLEM REPORTS ON THE VRML MAILING LIST. Not only will this embarass us, it will also create unnecessary noise on an otherwise productive mailing list. If you must get an answer to a technical support question immediately, you can call our labs at 914-679-2440. We're there most of the time but we're busy working on your next beta drop so please, keep your questions concise.

Paper Software, Inc.
4 Deming Street
Woodstock, NY, 12498
914-679-2440 (voice)
914-679-4123 (fax)