blaxxun Contact Release Notes

About this Version
The version of blaxxun Contact currently available for download is version 5.1 from October 31, 2001. You can check your version of the software by selecting the "About blaxxun Contact" menu item in the "Options" panel in blaxxun Contact. This document will be updated as we receive feedback and make further refinements. We welcome your comments and suggestions; you can e-mail them to our Support team.

New Features and Improvements

Download and setup
- New automatic (one click) and minimal size install (1.5 MB)
  for most users.
- With the new unified DirectX and OpenGL renderer the
  same version of Contact runs on all Windows platforms

Performance
- On newer systems usage of DirectX7 or Dx7T&L results in
  a huge performance gain.
- As texture are loaded in separate thread 3d navigation
  does not block while loading textures.

New 3d features
- Multitexturing and environment mapping.
- Completely customizable navigation and user interface
  system.
- 3d Sound with DirectX7.
- Collision response improved and emergency exit provided.
- Immediate access to navigation menu on double click.
- Move the camera (with view your avatar enabled) with
  Numtab keys.
- Tooltips for Anchors.
Pressing control modifies the current navigation mode e.g. to PAN while standing, Slide while moving... Scrolling the mouse wheel provides addtional navigation too. See 3d release notes below for further details.

MPEG4 compatible Layer3D and Layer2d nodes supported
Further information about all 3d related improvements can be found in the Contact3D release notes.

Media Support
Flash files are now supported via Real player (8.0) and MP3 files (non spatialized)

Language support
To decrease download size Contact is available in a minimal version supporting English, Spanish, German and French and an international version additionally supporting Chinese, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Korean, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish.

Compatibility
The current version has been developed for MS Internet Explorer 4.0 - 6.0 and Netscape Navigator 3.0 - 4.78. The supported operating systems are MS Windows 95/98, Windows Me, Windows NT and Windows 2000. You may use it on XP and in the Opera browser 5.x too, however both are not yet officially supported.

Corrections

3d
- The VRML console now only pops up for the most severe
  errors.
- OpenGL renderer completely reworked.
- DirectionalLights in the top level VRML corrected for
  VRML97 compliance.
- Better avatar handling for reconnects and connection losts.
- Fixed corrupt sound files.
- Several small 3d related issues.
- Http tunneling now works with authentication proxys in IE
  and passes far more firewalls.
- 1:1 chat to HTML enabled.

Known Bugs and Limitations
- On Win95 and 98 performance is poor without DirectX7 or
  a good OpenGL card. Please update to DirectX7 or 8.
- If you download the German voice library, text-to-voice
  might not work immediately. In that case, you need to close
  all browser windows and restart the application.
- Behind certain firewalls, download of the German
  text-to-voice system might not work at all.
- If you already have a Contact installation, the setup
  program does not ask if you want to make Contact the
  standard VRML browser for IE.
- No Http tunneling suppport for Netscape.
- Only the 3d viewer works in Netscape 6.x and Mozilla for
  Windows.
- Certain screen savers may crash Contact3d on
  Windows2000.

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