Re: LANG Inventor file format

John W. Barrus (barrus@merl.com)
Tue, 21 Jun 1994 11:07:43 -0400

>John Barrus wrote:
>>There are no distribution royalties for the SGI executables because every
>>SGI comes with Inventor run-time libraries. One easy way to start would be
>>to use an SGI to create the first Mosaic-like client using Inventor. That
>>executable and source could be freely distributed without royalties or
>>legal action.
>
>*Provided* you're only running on SGI machines, and moreover on SGI
>machines with a recent version of IRIX (if I read the docs correctly,
>Open Inventor doesn't run on older versions of the operating system).
>That's a little limiting -- my company has only one IRIS, and it's
>not up to IRIX 5.2 yet...
>
> -- Justin
> Who rather likes Inventor, but is a
> compulsive Devil's Advocate...

The executable will _only_ run on SGI's (IRIX 5.2 and greater) and the
source is useless unless you own the libraries on a machine on which you
plan to compile the source. I'm sorry, I thought that was obvious.

The older versions of Inventor (1.0, 1.1) do run on earlier versions of
IRIX, including 4.0.5x, which is what many machines are running still. I
don't know what incompatibilities have been introduced between 1.1 and 2.0
versions of Inventor. It could be that our subset of nodes has not changed
between releases.

The first non-SGI port would require quite a bit of work, including file
readers, graphics display code, lighting calculation code, etc., etc. No
easy feat!

John B.

-------------------------

John Barrus barrus@merl.com

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