Coin 4.0.3

If you are not familiar with Open Inventor, it is a scene graph based, retained mode, rendering and model manipulation, C++ class library, originally designed by SGI. It quickly became the de facto standard graphics library for 3D visualization and visual simulation software in the scientific and engineering community after its release. It also became the basis for the VRML1 file format standard. Several books exists on the subject of Open Inventor, most notably The Inventor Mentor, and The Inventor Toolmaker, both highly recommended for those who want to learn how to use Open Inventor. Coin is based on the API of this library, but was developed from scratch independently before SGI Open Inventor became open source. It does not share any code with SGI Open Inventor, other than through random coincidences guided by the Open Inventor API design. Coin reached the goal of Open Inventor 2.1 compatibility in the autumn of the year 2000, and has since then been extended with a huge set of additional features, ranging from 3D sound support to GLSL shader support, additional file formats like VRML97, and a large number of internal changes for keeping up with the newer, more optimized OpenGL rendering techniques that were not available in the earlier days. Another term you might find when reading about Coin is "Coin3D", which is the term we use on the larger group of libraries that all fall under the same license as Coin. Coin is the core of Coin3D.

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