New Script sharing in BS Contact saves memory

Proto instances are now only once in memory. Memory allocation is drastically reduced.

The prototype declaration is an important means to express recurring program parts in the VRML/X3D language. Programmers are using it to lay out several general features in a library that can be re-used in various projects with small variations in the parameters again. Over time the creation of many such Protos will get you a "Swiss Army Knife" – toolkit with many features for programming. Such a Proto-Library is useful wherever you need to quickly create a similar functionality, but with slight modifications.

In larger projects, these proto-libraries possess several thousand Protos and therefore constitute an important part of the know-how of the company. Hence, the Protos are usually encrypted by our customers with BS Encrypt and delivered only with the products in protected form.

Often Protos are inserted in several places in the program code, which in turn requires memory to be allocated each time. That means in all other instances of the same Protos new memory needs to be taken away from the application. In the current new version of BS Contact this memory created only once through "script sharing", so you can save on all subsequent uses much more memory. The programmer does not even need to think about the memory allocation himself. The new script sharing functionality is handling this for him transparently.

So for large programming projects, such as for example interactive online games that can use many of these Protos the memory requirements will be nearly halved thanks to the new automatic “script sharing” functionality in BS Contact.