Hardware Acceleration

OpenGL Hardware Acceleration

Introduction

Shout3D 2.5 offers an exciting hardware acceleration option that greatly improves performance for end users that have OpenGL accelerated graphics cards.

When you publish a Shout3D applet that makes use of this option, users who download the applet wil be asked if they want to install a hardware acceleration plug-in. The plug-in download size is very small, and the whole process, including installation, takes only a few seconds. Once installed for a given browser, a user will never be asked to install it again.

If a user chooses not to download the plug-in, your applet will appear in any event, running in the Shout3D Java software renderer. Thus you never need to worry about whether your content will appear on a web page.

The plug-in will install and operate on Microsoft Intenet Explorer 4+ and on Netscape 4+, but not on Netscape 6+. Netscape 6+ users will, nonetheless, be able to view your content in Java software mode.

Try out some of the hardware accelerated demos in your Shout3D installation to get the idea.

This OpenGL hardware acceleration version 1.0 works only with Shout3D 2.5. Any Shout3D 2.0 content that used the prior beta version of the OpenGL plug-in can continue to be used, because users will preserve the older installed plug-in even after installing the new one.

Publishing Hardware Accelerated Applets

To make use of the hardware acceleration option for an applet, you must follow three simple steps.

First, you must include the following Applet parameter in the APPLET tag.

<param name="renderer" value="OGL">

Second you must upload a copy of the opengl directory (found in the codebase directory of your Shout3D installation) to your web server. The easiest place to put it is in the same directory where the HTML file lives.

Third, you must include the following Javascript in the HEAD section of the HTML page to access Javascript functions in the checkPlugin.js file in the opengl folder. The following example assumes that the opengl folder is in the same directory on the server as the HTML file. (Compare with the HTML source code of the demos.)

<SCRIPT SRC="opengl/checkPlugin.js">
</SCRIPT>

<SCRIPT>
<!--
	checkBrowserPlugin(".");
//-->
</SCRIPT>

All of these steps are handled automatically when you publish with the Shout3D Wizard and select OpenGL as the Default Renderer. Try publishing with the Wizard and examine the resulting Published directory.

Under the Hood

The opengl directory contains a 27KB .cab file and and 35Kb .jar file. The .cab file is downloaded and installed by users of Microsoft Internet Explorer. The .jar file is downloaded by users of Netscape.

The .cab file installs files named ShoutOGL_JDB3.dll and OGLJDirect.class on your hard drive. To remove these files, simply search for them and delete them.

The files installed by the .jar files can be uninstalled through Netscape's own tools for removing plug-ins (updates).