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Welcome to the Tidarque home page. Tidarque is an open
source VRML browser for Unix. It
intends to be robust, full-featured, flexible and fast (in that order
!).
Tidarque is in a development stage. Current version is labeled 0.x.y, meaning you shouldn't expect too much from it. Not every VRML feature is supported yet. Furthermore, there is a (too) long list of known bugs. And quite a long list of desirable features not yet integrated.
Tidarque is distributed under the terms of a XFree86-like license. That means basically that you're free to do whatever you want with it, commercial or not.
Requirements
Tidarque uses perl for some urls and files bookkeeping, djpeg, pngtopnm and giftopnm for ImageTexture decoding, xanim (and some awful hacks) for MovieTexture rendering. gzip uncompress files when necessary. So you'll need all that. Note that if some of them are lacking, everything else will still work. If you have a decent box (particularly a Linux one), you should have all these already.How to get it
On the sourceforge page. Source and a few RPMs are available. You can also get the very latest source from the CVS tree.Features
Here are a few (already working) features of Tidarque.First of all, Tidarque is a browser, not a mere renderer. That means you can pass it an URL, Tidarque does the retrieval of the file, (full or partial), uncompresses it if necessary, and manages a cache of the already retrieved files. Also Tidarque is streamlined, meaning the data are displayed as soon as available. Of course, if the VRML file is a huge prototype with an instanciation at the end, that won't help much. On the other hand, if the object is broken down into manageable parts with Inline files or if there are textures, you don't have to wait until they're available to see the image displayed.
Tidarque extends the usual MPEG MovieTexture by allowing the use of Quicktime movie textures. Actually, Tidarque delegates the MPEG rendering to mtv if it is available, and xanim otherwise. Thus, Tidarque understands every video format understood by xanim.
The central component of Tidarque is a server allowing external processes to connect, influence the animation or get informations. This a very flexible scheme, a first use being the (very preliminary) tree browser, a window that let you explore the structure of an object. This "server" mechanism was designed to allow remote control of the animation and to feed external processes such as converters to other formats.
Enough words for now, if you mant a more precise idea, you've got... the mandatory Screen shots. See also the gallery of VRML scenes and objects, that you can test Tidarque (or your favorite VRML browser) against...
Credits
Tidarque builds upon the work of many others. The graphical rendering is perform on many platforms with Brian Paul's Mesa. The parser has been written using Terence Parr's PCCTS. The rendering of TrueType fonts for text uses Stéphane Rehel's gltt. The MovieTextures are rendered using Marc Podlipec's xanim and MPEG TV's mtv.Some file and text processing is done with Larry Wall's PERL.
More info
...can be found at .History
| Date | Version | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| 16 August 2001 | 0.1.0 | First decent vrmlscript engine. |
| 13 November 2000 | 0.0.3pre6 | Compile with RedHat 7.0 |
| 16 July 2000 | 0.0.1 | First release with configure included. Almost everything has changed. |
| 15 July 1999 | 0.000 | First "release" (that is, no configure) in the program structure |
Related works
Here are other open source VRML browsers for Unix:Tidarque has been written by Christophe Tronche.