Converting X3D to VRML about view3dscene HOT 3 CLOSED

Indeed, that was confusing docs -- we can save VRML, but only if you open a VRML. That is, we can "pretty print" VRML, we cannot convert to VRML from other formats. If you open a VRML 1.0 or 2.0 file ( https://github.com/castle-engine/demo-models contains some .wrl files) then view3dscene "Save as VRML/X3D" will offer to save with .wrl extension.

I improved various sentences of https://castle-engine.io/view3dscene.php and in README in repo to avoid this confusion.

Note: I do not see the sentence """You can also convert all models to X3D or VRML.""" in view3dscene README.md (in any download from https://castle-engine.io/view3dscene.php or in GitHub repo). It was present on our website though.

from view3dscene.

@michaliskambi

a thought...

can't you, mostly, save as .x3dv, hand change the header/version, remove profile/meta and change the files extension, if it didn't have v3 features. (which is always the case if it had been, backward compatibly, converted from wrl.)

in which case, couldn't this process be automatic? like...

internally 'save' to stream of bytes in classic encoding, with header changes, reload the stream and if error, report unable and why, is successful then save it as valid wrl?

from view3dscene.

can't you, mostly, save as .x3dv, hand change the header/version, remove profile/meta and change the files extension, if it didn't have v3 features. (which is always the case if it had been, backward compatibly, converted from wrl.)

That is indeed the manual process of "downgrading" from X3D to VRML 2.0. But no, I do not want to automate it or anywhere guarantee that view3dscene/CGE support it, because it is not trivial in the general case (see 2 points below) and also extremely extremely low priority (VRML 97 is more than 20 years old... you should upgrade to X3D by this point, not downgrade back :) ).

• We do not detect if there are "features in this file that work only in X3D, and some nodes are missing from VRML", so we could not warn you "this X3D content is not really a valid VRML".
• We do not process NURBS nodes to make the downgrade (and we should, if we wanted to make a reliable downgrade: https://castle-engine.io/x3d_implementation_nurbs.php#section_vrml2_support ).

Bottom line is that we do not implement, and don't plan to implement, a conversion to VRML. It was a simple docs mistake that they suggested we did :)

from view3dscene.