CARBON GRAPHICS ANNOUNCES THE AVAILABILITY OF GEO 1.1 BETA AND THE ABILITY TO EMBED THE GEO BEHAVIOR DEFINITION LANGUAGE DIRECTLY WITHIN THE OPENFLIGHT® FORMAT

PARK CITY, Utah, February 21, 2004 -- Carbon Graphics is pleased to announce the immediate availability of the first Beta release of Geo Version 1.1. This release introduces many cutting edge features as well as bug fixes & customer-requested improvements. The main highlights are...

• Added a new Project To Grid Tool. Projects any selected geometry onto the Grid.
• Major enhancement to GeoScript introduced. You can know write completely interactive tools in GeoScript. Added a new "Make Polygon.gs" script to the Scripts directory to showcase this capability - it does everything that the existing compiled  plugin.dll can do - including interactive grabber management!. You simply define certain GeoScript functions (such as init, getNodePick, getCoordInput, postDraw, update, done, cancel etc.) and Geo will call the appropriate function at the appropriate time - just as it calls similar named tool functions when executing a compiled plugin. This is completely interactive and works just like a standard plugin, except that the GeoScript "plugin" is interpreted and directly called without the need to compile, link or load into Geo. GeoScript tools will execute slightly slower than standard compiled plugins, precisely because they are interpreted but it should be unnoticeable for most tools that just require simple or limited user interaction. 
• Enhanced GeoScript  by exposing additional SDK modules within GeoScript:
  • Pick
  • Draw
  • ToolGui
  • Vect
  • Manip
  • Isect
  • DebugPrint
• The DebugPrint functions allow GeoScripts to print progress & other data to an log file while the script is being executed. This is useful when loading and/or converting multiple files and a problem ocurrs in one file - this feature allows a script writer to document errors etc.
• GeoScript tools can now specify a GIF format bitmap, tooltip, menu label, author, copyright information and more (just like an SDK-built plugin). This information is stored in the .gsd description file. It will be in the same directory as the equivalent GeoScript .gs file and have the same base name. If a gsd file is not present Geo will generate the script plugin name etc from the script file name & use defaults for all other properties.
• Edge picking (Left-Mouse pick + Shift Key over an edge) was broken and did not work. This has been fixed.
• The Geo Floating network license server now acts as a Windows Service and exists beyond a user's startup session and/or reboot.
• Made the following improvements to the Aechelon Technology Hie Format import/export plugins...
  • Polygons flagged as hidden are now ignored by the exporter.
  • Polygons flagged as Draw Both Sides are now separated into their own RenderGroups and written out as PTO files that reference a unique GeoState with CULLFACE set to OFF.
  • The Material - MAT file was incorrectly setting the mode to [COLOR_AMBIENT_AND DIFFUSE] instead of [COLOR_AMBIENT_AND_DIFFUSE]. The last underscore was missing!
• Made the following improvements to the OpenFlight Format import/export plugins...
  • Imported Polygons that have no vertex normals will now automatically use their parent polygon's face normal. Previously, a default normal value [0,1,0] was used and this would give strange visual anomalies.
  • Previously, polygons referencing materials with alpha would not be correctly interpreted on import. This has been fixed. Now, Geo identifies this & sets the UseMtlColor flag to access the alpha information of the material.
  • Geo now supports the read/write of OpenFlight Text Nodes.
  • Geo now supports the read/write of OpenFlight Clip-Region Nodes.
  • Major enhancement to the OpenFlight importer/exporter - it is now possible to save (and load) the entire Geo behavior definition in the OpenFlight format (this includes all variable definitions, behaviors, actions & state machines). The information is encoded within OpenFlight comment fields in a structured ascii representation of the Geo Behavior Node information. This allows the information to be hand-edited if desired. Geo will load an OpenFlight file with the appropriate Geo definitions & completely rebuild the Geo behavior data. On load into Geo - the Geo behavior comments are stripped out (having been replaced by the equivalent behavior engine structures). Any third-party Node comments are left intact. This allows geo-created behavior to be used in OpenFlight run-times without requiring an entire loader rewrite - only a behavior comment parser is required (which is available from Carbon Graphics under a separate license).
• There was a bug in the Linear Action that  would not allow a user to specify the C-Operand in the equation as another variable. The bizarre effect of this was that the A-Operand  would be set to the chosen C-Operand variable and the C-Operand would be set to Framecount. This has been fixed.
• The DWB Import File Dialog did not show any *.dwb files in the current directory (you had to select All Files in order to see any dwb files). This has been fixed.
• Geo now works correctly on the 3DLabs WildCat graphics card (previously there were texture display and co-planar polygon problems).
• Made the following changes to the Coryphaeus Software (Dwb) format import & export Plugins:
  • Fixed a major (and long-standing) problem associated with Translate Links, their mapping functions and files created with non-meter units. This was due to an inconsistency in the DWB export (some mapping function values are written out from DWB with a unit change multiplication applied to them and others are not). We think we have caught all the inconsistencies now. The result, of which, was translation behavior "scale" errors.
  • Previously the Geo DWB exporter would break up the Geo behavior action list into discrete DWB links with 1 mapping function (the best legal DWB format to represent Geo's behavior mechanism). This would result in (when reloaded back into Geo) a Geo behavior for each DWB link - each with 1 action. The result was that the original single multi-action behavior (in Geo) had been converted (via the DWB export & import) into multiple single-action behaviors. The Geo importer now recognizes multiple single action behaviours and automatically merges them back into a single behavior on import.

About Carbon Graphics

Carbon Graphics LLC is an innovative company specializing in software products & services for the Visual Simulation market. Their flagship product is Geo - a 3D modeling and animation tool used for building, editing & animating dynamic real-time models and scenes. Visit the Carbon Graphics Web site at http://www.carbongraphics.com

For further in formation regarding this press release or Carbon Graphics, please contact:  

Alison Weckler, Director of Marketing
Carbon Graphics LLC
(435) 649-9874
alison@carbongraphics.com

Carbon Graphics and Geo are trademarks of Carbon Graphics LLC. Any other trademarks or trade names mentioned in this press release are the property of their respective owners.