2.1 - Introduction to the Application Architecture

The VR-Vantage Toolkit includes the classes and functions needed to build or extend 3D visualization applications.

It gives you access to almost all of VR-Vantage's functionality, including:

• Windows and channels.
• Scene objects such as entities, props, terrain, and the environment.
• Observers.
• Drivers.
• The graphical user interface (GUI).
• The top-level objects and application framework that tie all of the functionality together.

The VR-Vantage applications are built using the VR-Vantage Toolkit. You can use the VR-Vantage Toolkit to customize or extend the functionality of these applications - either by creating plug-ins, or by starting with our sample code and building your own similar applications. You can also use the Toolkit to embed pieces of VR-Vantage functionality into your own applications. This chapter provides an introduction to the VR-Vantage Toolkit. It introduces the DtDe class - the top-level class in the VR-Vantage Toolkit, and describes the various ways in which your code can interact with it. ("De" stands for display engine.)

Note

Header files for VR-Vantage Toolkit classes have the same name as the class that they define. For example, the header file for DtDe is DtDe.h. Therefore, in this manual, we do not specify a header file when we introduce a class.

Other pages describe the other key elements of the VR-Vantage Toolkit - the classes that represent scene objects, drivers, and so on. The DtDe class uses these classes to perform most of its work. You will typically access these classes through the DtDe. And when you want to extend or customize these classes (to extend or customize the behavior of VR-Vantage applications), you will typically register your subclasses with VR-Vantage through the DtDe.

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