Comments: Corel, Virtual Reality, and Visual Basic

Before anything else, allow me to invite you to check out the new online version of this newsletter (take the fourth link on our home page). In the past, I had been posting an Adobe Acrobat version of each newsletter at our web site. If you downloaded it and viewed it with the Acrobat reader, you were presented with a true, in color, copy of the newsletter with hot links. However, I got the feeling that not many took the time to do this since it involved the download. So, I decided to try to create an online HTML version--I was already reproducing the main articles in HTML format in the "Online Reviews" section. This just added a bit more work, and it turned out to be easier and consumed less hard disk space than I had originally thought.

Corel

As usual, Corel gave us a stellar presentation of outstanding products. They were also generous with the door prizes (I am wearing my prize in the photo at the right) and the special user group pricing on their major products. I and each of the individuals on either side of me took advantage of the offer on Corel Draw 8 and the WebMaster Suite. And I noticed many others filling out the order forms that were passed around. In a little over three weeks I had a nice fat box from Corel sitting at my door--much sooner than promised--but too late for a review in the newsletter. However, part of one of the products intrigued me, and I just had to give it a try: Corel Web.World

I first installed Corel Draw 8. That took about 225 MB of that new 5.1 GB second drive I wrote about adding last month. Then WebMaster Suite took around another 100 MB. It's a good thing I got the drive. I remembered enough of an earlier version of Corel Draw to whip out a birthday card for someone in a short time. I haven't used Corel Draw in some time, since I have been using a newer version Micrografx's similar product for the past several years. I plan on using both now so as to compare the two programs.

After installing the WebMaster Suite, I took a quick look at the features of the main program Corel Web.Designer to get the feel of it and then quickly moved on to Corel Web.World, the virtual reality creation program. This program and several of the other lesser programs in the Suite must not be true Windows 95 programs since they don't support long file names. Corel Draw 8 and Web.Designer are Windows 95 programs.

During the Corel presentation, the presenter did not actually build a Virtual Reality (VR) project; she used one that had been created earlier just to show what the results of using the program could be. Actually constructing such a VR world would take too much time for a brief presentation.

In using the program, you basically choose a level on which you want to work, say, 0 to 3 units. Here you create your rooms and other rectangular objects--a room is just a rectangular object with the inside cut out. You can then apply color to the walls and "hang" objects on the walls. These objects on the walls can then be given properties such that when a visitor to your virtual world double clicks on the object they may see a text message, hear a MIDI music file being played, be sent to another site on the Internet, or transported to another virtual world you have created.

If I have created a room or collection of rooms on level 0 - 3, then I could change to level 3.5 - 6.5 and create a second floor above the one I just created. I haven't found a good way to move from a first floor to the second floor. Right now one just moves up through the air from the first to the second floors. I suppose you could create two different VR worlds with one the first floor of the building and the second world being the second floor. Then a double click on the stairs, for example, could take you from one floor to the next. I have had only one day to work on the program before writing this article, but to see an example of what can be accomplished, go to the site http://www.canx.com/tpcug/communications_sig/virtual/world3/mosi.htm . It is hidden away at our web site in the Announcements section under the Communications/Internet SIG. The address above may change as I make new and better versions, but there will always be a link in the Communications/Internet SIG section. When I get it real polished, I may give it a link on the main page.To view the VR world, your browser will have to have VMRL viewing capability installed. Both Netscape and Microsoft Browsers provide add-ons for this. You may or may not have this feature installed. If your browser has this ability installed, when you go to the above site you will see my version of the MOSI floor plan. See if you can find the man at the computer in the computer lab upstairs. To get upstairs you just sort of walk through the air at present. Later, I will make this more realistic with you going to the stairs then double clicking or something to be transported to the second level.

Just like there is a Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) for writing the code for a web page, there is a Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML) for creating VR objects. Both produce text files with associated graphic files for whatever pictures you want to put on your web page or hang on the walls of your VR world. What follows are the first few lines of the VR file for the MOSI VR project.

Separator{
ShapeHints {shapeType SOLID vertexOrdering COUNTERCLOCKWISE}
SpotLight {on FALSE}
PerspectiveCamera{
orientation 0 1 0 0.00170909
position 5415 3009 11346
heightAngle 2.42572
}
DEF BackgroundColor Info{
string" 0.517647 0.768627 0.721569"
}
Coordinate3{
point[
256 0 6144, 256 0 9984, 256 896 9984, 256 896 6144, 7680 0 6144, 7680 896

and much, much more. If I knew what all those numbers meant, I probably would know why my colors aren’t reproducing properly.

I am always on the lookout for interesting things to do with Visual Basic. This last month produced two. Creating an ActiveX component to place on a web page and enumerating all the installed programs on a computer.

In some sense creating an ActiveX component for a web page is similar to creating a VR object to place on a web page. In both cases you use a special program to create the object. For ActiveX, I used Microsoft Visual basic to create a special type Visual Basic program to be uploaded to the web site, which is similar to what I did above with the VR object. Next, just as your browser needed to have the VMRL add-on installed to be able to view the VR world, you will need to download what I would call the Microsoft Visual Basic runtime environment files to your computer to be able to view the ActiveX object on your web page. Once you have these files, you will not have to download them again, but that first time could be time consuming, since the minimal size is around 700 KB. Once you have all the required files, you can do some powerful things with ActiveX. In my simple example, I just had a real time clock running on the page, spaces for the user to fill in information, some of which was numerical, and then a button to press to do calculations with the numerical information, and spaces to display the various calculations. Then just for a lark, I had the component change colors if you clicked on it.

All this is very cute and indeed useful; however, there is one problem other than the need for the one time download of the run time environment files. It is all the warnings you will get along the way from your browser telling you of the potential dangers of renegade ActiveX components from untrustworthy developers. And I am relegated to the untrustworthy category, since I don't have a "certificate" from what, as best I can tell, is the self appointed issuer of such things. To get such a certificate, one needs to have a "substantial presence and evidence of financial responsibility as evidenced by such things as a Dun & Bradstreet rating." So unless there is a way figured out to make people like me "trustworthy", I don't think there will be much reason for me to put any such components out on the web just yet

How many programs are installed on your computer? I have 701 on my C drive alone. You say, "No one has that many programs installed." Well, it all depends on what you call a program. Using the definition of a program as being a file with the .EXE extension, I have 701 programs on my C drive. And you probably have at least 200.

Why would anyone want to know such a thing, and, then, how can you enumerate the programs? The last part of the question is what someone asked me. The first answer is that Microsoft has some such program for managing the installed programs on all the computers on a network. And, of course, in Windows 95 you have a list of the programs that you can uninstall, but the non-Windows 95 programs will not be there. For these types of programs, I suppose, you could check every .INI file. And then it came to me that all you needed to do was use the find feature in Windows Explorer with the file name set to *.exe. This would produce a list of executable files. Of course, it is a list with which you can't do much.

My project was to write a Visual Basic project that would also find these files and additionally present you with a list that could be dealt with as any other text file: saved, printed, sorted. With this sort of information, you can compare the state of the installed program base now with the previous month, look for major software titles, and what interests your boss--look for game titles.

To write such a program you need to think of a drive, e.g. C, as a tree trunk with all the folders as branches, the subfolders as branches off the branches, etc., with the programs as the leaves on the branches. You then proceed to search along all the tree's branches. As I said I came up with 701 leaves on my tree. What I am going to do with this information , I don’t know. But it was interesting project, and it helps keep my programming skills alive. u