Posted by bjoern on May 13, 2017; 5:54pm
URL: https://forum.jogamp.org/Java3D-1-6-Web-Start-from-Mac-OS-X-to-Multi-OS-tp4037924p4037983.html

Hi Phil!

I am happy that you like our proggy! Yes, it is indeed very technical, but it is a very convenient approach for those people who have to model a membrane.

And yes, I think we have to increase awareness of your Java3D implementation, because it is very powerfull and you guys extended the life of many software tools for the coming years - although Julien might be right in that Web Start will not live forever ;-)

Also thanks for the info about the heap space - that is good to know! But if I understood you right, you did not use Java 8, or? Indeed, I developed the new release on the Mac, so I am surprised if you would still have the problem with Java 8. The problem which you mention I once solved for another app: using Java 6 or 7, I asked the user if it is okay to remove Java 3D-related file from the Java folder - this is of course very dirty. You approach is of course much better:
-Djava.ext.dirs=./none/
However, I fear this is not possible for Java Web Start.

A long time ago we did experiments with the retained mode for the MembraneEditor, but as the requires a high level of interactivity, we skipped this idea later. So especially for molecular visualization it is interesting, as you have to visualize a lot of spheres in some modes. But as we later introduced also the possibility to change the coordinate of every single atom by our packing algorithms, the retained mode was not an option for us anymore. In the 3D Settings there is a Performance Mode hidden which is making a little bit use of tricks to increase the performance by removing the option to use atom-based modifications. Still, this is not comparable to retained mode.

But the strong aspect of JOGL is now, that you have in the background much more options to do tricks like shader programming in the future, and this is good that you go into this direction with J3D 1.7! And this is something which was nearly impossible with the old Java 3D implementation from Sun!

So I hope I will soon find some time to test 1.7!

Cheers,
Bjorn