With a little help from the wonderful Matrix and Quaternion FAQ I finished the math library for the Paramatrix server. It is now possible to rotate all objects using Quaternions.
Yesterday I thought a little about animating objects directly in the 3D server. Animating using the 3D client/server network interface is possible, but probably too slow. I need to create some kind of an animation scripting language to be specified in Metatype, for which a specific computer language needs be designed. That language should implement time-based sequential and parallel statements, like “move object a from b to c in 500 milliseconds and then rotate it by 50 degrees in 300 milliseconds”. A view might then query the object’s state at a descrete time and the language interpreter will then try to apply the appropriate statements to compute the interpolated object translation and orientation.
The next step in the Paramatrix project is to fix one minor bug in the redering code and to implement matrix caches in the scene-graph. The matrix-caches are required by the focus-manager to support fast point in polygon tests without the help of the current rendering library used.