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FreeWRL Home Page

Welcome to the FreeWRL web pages.

DISCLAIMER: All information and programs presented on these pages is presented strictly on an as-is basis without an explicit or implicit warranty or guarantee of any kind, not even for fitness for any particular purpose. The FreeWRL logo is based on the Linux Penguin logo by Larry Ewing. All trademarks are owned by their respective owners.

FreeWRL is an open-source(R) VRML browser written by Tuomas J. Lukka, John Stewart and others, placed under the Gnu Library General Public License. It is written particularly on/for Linux but runs also under other Unix operating systems (e.g. Irix, OSF, Solaris) with little trouble. For the current version, see the news page. For release history, see the file README.

If you use FreeWRL in an interesting project, drop John Stewart a note (and a link if possible).

Latest

Newest news (for the previous items, see the news page)
  • 14.June.1999 -- 0.20alpha1 is out! EAI is pretty good now, still a few bugs to work on.
  • 18.May.1999 -- 0.19beta2 should be released soon. I have been working on EAI code, and fixing some minor bugs. The EAI code and SHARED VIRTUAL WORLDS should work 100% soon...
  • 23.Mar.1999 -- 0.19 is out. Great gains in EAI, some documentation updates.

    Features

    FreeWRL is currently still in alpha stage but has several interesting features:
  • A Descent(tm)-like FLY mode with full 6 degrees of freedom (with 12 keys to control movement).
  • A programmatic interface enabling you to make scripts to take snapshots of the world at specific times and places, e.g. for making a movie for non-VRML-enabled people.
  • Script node support for both Java and Javascript (as well as Perl)
  • TrueType(tm) font support using the FreeType library
  • OpenGL rendering (on Linux using the Mesa library) -- which means hardware accelerated rendering on many systems.
  • Open, pluggable framework -- the browser, event model, backend and script engines can all be easily replaced with code to handle new interfaces, e.g. binary VRML, other 3D library interfaces, new scripting languages, whatever.
  • Support for most nodes, PROTOs (with events), and Inlines
  • Written mostly in Perl, allowing fast prototyping of possible extensions as well as concise code. (Which other language would enable one person to write a nearly complete browser in just a couple of months in his spare time?)
  • Support for XSwallow for embedding into Netscape (see the screenshot)

    Downsides

    For fairness sake, here is the list of current downsides, which I hope to eradicate as soon as possible:
  • Some nodes and features are currently only partially implemented -- You can help me. Report the nodes and features I haven't yet completely implemented and you need right now -- or even send a patch
  • Uses external libraries which you may have to compile separately (JPEG, FreeType)
  • No binary distributions yet
  • Incomplete EAI implementation (work is in progress)

    Contact

    If you want to help, please email John Stewart at John.Stewart@crc.ca.

    If you want to get email when I release a new version, please mail me to be added to the list.