Previewing and Packaging the Scene
overview . . .
Find it: File > Package
Be sure to preview your world during the authoring process to test links,
animations, sensors, and scripts, and to see how it feels to navigate through
your world in the browser.
Before you publish your worlds on the Web, you need to package them using
Cosmo Worlds. Packaging refers to the process of locating all the files necessary to create a scene
or world and organizing the files for publication on a server. Publishing refers to the process of copying the packaged files to a Web server where
they can be accessed by Web clients.
Packaging accomplishes a number of things:
- It collects all the files needed to make up your world on the Web and puts them into a single directory.
- It converts absolute paths to relative paths so that the package can be moved to a different location
(for example, a Web server).
- It modifies the file format so that it conforms to the current VRML standard. Files saved in Cosmo Worlds can
be viewed directly using Cosmo Player on a system that has Cosmo Worlds installed
on it, but the files need to be packaged before they are published on the
Web.
Major Stages
When you select File > Package, the Packaging utility appears. The four buttons in the lower left corner
allow you to step through each of the stages of the packaging/publishing
process:
- Discover
- This stage finds all the local files needed to support your documents. All
local URLs referred to in your file (for example, inlines, textures, sounds,
and images) are located and included as part of the package for this world.
- Package
- This stage copies the files required for your package into a single directory.
Absolute paths are changed to relative paths so that the world can be published
on a Web server.
- Preview
- This stage allows you to view the packaged files so that you can test links,
animations, sensors, scripts, and navigation through your world.
- Publish
- This stage moves the package to a Web server so that remote clients can
view it. (not currently implemented)
The packager works with files in the following formats:
- Cosmo Worlds (these files are converted to VRML 2.0 format; Cosmo Worlds contains some additional
features that are not part of VRML 2.0)
- VRML 1.0 and VRML 2.0 (VRML 1.0 files are converted to VRML 2.0)
- Inventor (Inventor files are converted to VRML 2.0)
- Cosmo Create (these files contain some authoring data that is not part of standard HTML,
but most browsers simply ignore the extra data)
- HTML
Other document types are not searched for references to other local documents,
they do not have their references patched, nor are they optimized; they
are just moved to the packaging directory.
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