Silicon Graphics, Inc.

Java3D Release Notes

In addition to the information here, also see Sun's Java3D Website for more general information about the purpose and use of the Java 3D API.

General Release Notes

This is a developer release of an implementation of version 1.1.1 of the Java 3DTM API Edition, which is a set of classes and shared libraries that allows the use of Silicon Graphics Java Environment to develop and execute Java programs written in the Java 3DTM API. This software can be used with IRIX 6.2 through 6.5.

There are several different ways to use the Silicon Graphics Java Environment to develop and execute three-dimensional graphics applications.

They include:

This implementation of Java3D API.
Numerous Java Bindings for OpenGL that allow programmers to write Java code to use the underlying OpenGL library for high-performance rendering.
Using native code wrapper using JNI around existing high-level graphics libraries such as Optimizer or Performer.

Java3D on IRIX

Java3d expects to be installed on top of the SGI Java2 environment. Once you install java3d you can run some of the demos that are under usr/demos/java/j3d. To run the Java3D demos you will need to set your CLASSPATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to the java3d core libraries.

The following C-shell alias can be used to setup your CLASSPATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH correctly to run java3d applications.

alias j3d-setup-install 
  'setenv DISPLAY $HOST\:0.0; 
   setenv J3D /usr/java ; 
   setenv CLASSPATH ".:$J3D/lib/ext/vecmath.jar:$J3D/lib/ext/j3dcore.jar:$J3D/lib/ext/j3dutils.jar:$J3D/lib/ext/j3daudio.jar" ; 
   setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH ".:$J3D/lib32/mips"'

Known Problems with Java3D on IRIX

No o32 library so java -32 does not work for Java3D.
Using the default shared memory transport for X (with DISPLAY set to :0.0) does not work. You will need to setenv DISPLAY machine:0.0 to use the socket transport. This works. This is due to an underlying problem in the SGI Java2v1.2.1 VM which will be fixed in the next release.
Audio support is missing. The libj3daudio.so is not part of the the current release of java3d.
java3d does not work with native threads.
Most of the testing has been under IRIX 6.5.x on an O2 and so there may be issues on other IRIX systems.
There may be issues with using java3d along with the java_plugin. We have not tried this.

Reporting Problems/Support

We encourage you to submit your comments on this and future test releases of Java3d API's to java3d-comments@corp.sgi.com .

We are unable to provide support at this time for the Developer Release bits. In place, we will be focusing our resources to incorporate your input into subsequent release candidates of the Java3D API on IRIX in the upcoming months.

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