How does one get an appropriately formed VM for the Mac?  I 
downloaded 3.0.14 as the latest-and-greatest, but now Wonderland 
(with all updates loaded) only displays all-black backgrounds and 
characters.

Mark

>Folks -
>
>There are seven more updates out on the servers for 3.1 now.  Note 
>that (as 4023B3DBumper tells you ( but even your struly didn't read 
>it ;-)) 4024, while a fantastic step forward, will actually render 
>(so to speak) Wonderland and other 3D unusable until you get a new 
>VM, and we haven't issued a full set of new VMs yet.  if you care 
>about this, watch for new VMs for your favorite platform before 
>upgrading past the bumper (or, of course, make your own (and tell us 
>if you do this for *nix ;-)).
>
>Enjoy
>	- Dan
>----------------------------
>4020RepaintFix-ar -- Andreas Raab -- 14 May 2001
>Fixes a problem when repainting an object partially out of the 
>world's boundaries (in which case the painting was truncated there)."
>
>4021flapsFromBrowser-sw -- Scott Wallace -- 15 May 2001
>Cleans up the situation where a 3.1a image is launched from a 
>Browser via the ProjectLauncher."
>
>4022CMBackStop-ar -- Andreas Raab -- 15 May 2001
>A backstop for BitBlt if it doesn't handle full color maps correctly."
>
>4023B3DBumper -- Andreas Raab -- 16 May 2001
>Give people a chance to bail out before the next update."
>
>4024B3DNoCompromise -- Andreas Raab -- 16 May 2001
>This change set includes a complete reimplementation of 3D hardware 
>acceleration. The new approach goes exclusively for speed and much 
>less for compatibility. It also provides two different approaches 
>for Morphic integration depending upon whether the underlying 
>implementation supports direct frame buffer access or not. Both 
>variants are currently implemented; on Windows we're using direct 
>frame buffer access, on Macs we're using texture compositing. Of 
>course, texture compositing is a lot slower than direct access but 
>it's still faster than having to deal with glReadPixels...
>Acceleration is available from both, Wonderlands (in the camera's 
>red halo menu) as well as the scene explorer morph (where it is 
>directly integrated in the user interface).
>Because of the capabilities of modern 3D hardware and APIs various 
>improvements have been made to the general interface of 
>B3DRenderEngine, including a 'polygon mode' (for rendering 
>point/wireframe representation of meshes), points and lines in 
>general, as well as fog (I just needed this so it's part of the 
>interface; also available from the wonderland camera's viewer). More 
>capabilities can and will be added but care must be taken that these 
>are available across varying APIs.
>Currently, the new scheme supports OpenGL for Macs and Direct3D 
>(DirectX 7) for Windows. DirectX7 was taken because it provides 
>serious improvements in terms of speed and structure (DX7 is the 
>first DX version treating renderer state as renderer state and is 
>therefore much more closely related to OpenGL). An OpenGL 
>implementation of the accelerator for Windows is also available (I'm 
>planning to integrate both D3D and OpenGL at some point so people 
>can use what's best on their machines) but for now only D3D is 
>tested (because my OpenGL drivers crash on me).
>Porting to *nix should be relatively straightforward given the 
>existance of GLX. The platform dependent code for the OpenGL 
>bindings are a few hundred lines of code mostly concerned with how 
>to interface to the host platform. It should also be possible to 
>implement direct frame buffer support through the use of p-buffers 
>but I have no hardware that does support p-buffers so that remains 
>to be seen.
>Anyways. Seeing the scene explorer in 1024x768 with 150fps on a 
>Laptop is fun. Running the Nudibranch at roughly 20fps even more :-)
>
>4025UpdateLessOften -- Andreas Raab -- 16 May 2001
>Make thumbnail updates for 3D objects be less often."
>
>4026B3DCSupportCode -- Andreas Raab -- 16 May 2001
>The C support code for 3D acceleration; includes Mac and Win ports."

--------------------------
Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280
Associate Professor - Learning Sciences & Technologies.
Collaborative Software Lab - http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/csl/
(404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html