The core of the Pegasus3D browser is a simple engine that kicks off four activities: start-up initialization, handling input events, updating the state of the current world, and rendering the current world onto the display. The last three represent the browser's main loop, cycled through over and over again endlessly until told to stop.

Start-up Initialization

Sequentially, the browser initializes itself in this order:

  1. Start SDL and the Acorn Virtual Machine
  2. Initialize all built-in World types, Resource types, and global environment variables.
  3. Run the browser's configuration program (written in Acorn). In addition to performing system and user configuration and personalization tasks, it also loads and initializes shared libraries that define additional types.
  4. Start libcurl and then load the browser's default (or specified) world ("world.acn") as the current world ('$').

At this point, the browser starts running the main loop on '$', the current world. Each iteration of the loop performs input event handling, scene state update and rendering as described below, synchronized to the display's refresh rate. The browser stops this loop when the current world returns false to .running?

Input Event Handling

This stage is responsible for exchanging events information between the world and external agents, particularly user input and synchronization with the world's server.

Queued user input events (such as keyboard, mouse/pointer, touch screen, etc.) are retrieved (from SDL) and processed in the order they were detected. Each distinct event type has its own unique symbol, enabling them to be easily dispatched to the appropriate input event processors. The browser peels off some of these events for its own use (e.g., to close the browser or allow entry of a new url). Some input events are handled directly by the world. Others are forwarded to the appropriate overlay, including the main 3-D view, depending on the input context (e.g., where the pointer or selection box is located or the existence of an input focus for receiving keystrokes).

Queued UDP communications from the world's server are retrieved and dispatched accordingly. These typically involve spawning new scene parts or events, or updating the attributes of existing scene parts based on server calculations and rules.

The final step involves sending back to the world's server important trigger events that need to be handled by the server, particularly certain user requests.

Scene State Update

The framerate is the heartbeat that governs the perception of motion within a world. The browser calculates the delta time in seconds ($.dt) since the last update. It then calls the .heartbeat method for every world part that has subscribed to the heartbeat. This often goes to controllers responsible for animation, scripted behaviors, streaming media, motion and collision detection,

Scene Rendering

Rendering the world involves an ordered traversal of the world's render "scene graph":

  1. World. _Render sequentially renders each overlay in .render's list, which likely includes at least one camera for rendering the 3-D scene to the browser's main window.
  2. Overlay/Camera. It switches the OpenGL context to tbe designated .target window/frame, and sets up and clears the viewport rectangle and appropriate buffers with needed background and borders. The Camera goes further, scanning the scene graph in preparation to identify objects to render, calculates all matrices for the camera and all nodes, and then renders all nodes in appropriate sorted order (opaque from front to back, then transparent from back to front).
    3. The Camera in essence holds the rendering context containing valuable information for rendering such as the camera matrices, lighting, etc.
  3. Group Renders each part in its .parts list in order.
  4. Shape. Shape activates the appropriate shader (using uniforms from the shape and camera context) and then loads and renders the vertex information whose attributes are described by the Shape.
  5. Shader. When Shape renders a Shader, it compiles it, if needed, loads the uniform values from the shape or context, and then sets it as the active shader.

Code Dependencies

The Pegasus3D browser is written in C. Its code uses these libraries: