Horde3D

Hi,

my company is planning a new project for 3D Visualization. Now we are looking for a 3D Engine that can be used for the rendering
of the scences.
Some geographic data should be visualized thus it would be nice if the engine can support the transformation of different
geographic coordinate systems. But nevertheless it should be clear that this feature is not needed for a game engine.

An important point is the fact, that the engine can be used in a browser using a plugin. According to this the data should be
fetched from a web server or database using some sort of dynamic loading or streaming. Some threads below I have read that streaming is possible. Which remote source can be used? Is it possible to encode these streames (to encode them by Horde)? Furthermore the received data should be cached to reduce the traffic.

The embedding of images, sounds and videos into the scene would be nice.

It would be nice if you can tell me if some of the demands are supported by the engine.

Thanks and best regards
Christian

Hello,
until someone who knows horde3d better than me will answer, i'll try to help you as i can.

I'm not aware of Horde3D browser plugins, so you would have to develop it.

Ps. Have anybody investigated possibility of Horde3D usage in Google Native Client API?


Firstly, horde3d is mainly a graphics engine. Of course there is a Horde3D Game Engine, which is superset of Horde3D Graphics Engine. Latter one, might have HTTP resource loader (i'm not sure, but probably not). Horde3D Graphics Engine has streaming, yes, but it's not accurately the same streaming you are talking about. You can load your assets dynamically from memory buffers provided by You. So, you would have to write yourself/ use specialized library to supply assets from remote web-server to Horde3D Graphics Engine. You could load your assets with Horde3D Utility Toolkit (from local filesystem) too.

So, Horde3D has great clean API, it's fast, and is small (so Your users could download plugin faster, and with less bandwidth).
If you expect complete solution for projects like Yours, it might be not the best option though. You might look for open scene graph or something else.

Hopefully it helped

Supplementary to what shd has already written (which is totally correct) there was a browser plugin developed by thomas3. But it seems like this is not available anymore.