From: stgprao@xing.unocal.com (Richard Ottolini)
Subject: survey of virtual-world specification languages
Date: Wed, 4 Dec 1991 19:24:46 GMT
Organization: Unocal Corporation, Anaheim, California



I am curious what people are doing to develop systems to specify objects,
scenes, and behaviors in virtual-worlds.  Some questions:

(1) Are people bootstrapping off existing CAD or animation systems (e.g.
Mac Swivel or ALIAS) or are they developing their own systems?

(2) What capabilities in addition to a CAD or animation system are necessary
to describe everything necessary for a virtual world?

(3) Have people found a particular software methodology more enabling than
others?  For example, object-oriented/C++, ratio of declarative to procedural,
etc.

(4) What are the names and availability of existing systems to do this?

The reason I ask this is because I see much discussion about philosophy
and hardware in this newsgroup, but not much about software.

Also I was wondering about standard development systems were party A can
design an application for party B's virtual-world-operating-system running
on other vendor's hardware.  Then each party can specialize in developing
their level of interest rather than having to engineer more than they want. ]