Friday 19 May 2017

Use Sony's plug-in chooser to deactivate unwanted plug-ins

Sony provides a plug-in chooser application which you can download from Sony's Web site. To install the application, download the file npc10.zip (112 Kbytes) and unzip it into a new application folder. Double-click on the file NpChooser.exe to start the application and bring up a plug-in chooser window.
The chooser window has an upper area that provides a scrolling list of content-types (also known as MIME types). If you select one of the content types, the lower part of the chooser window displays lists of active and inactive plug-ins for that content type. Clicking on the name of an active or inactive plug-in displays information about that plug-in in the area to the right.

To enable or disable VRML plug-ins, scroll through the content type list and look for one or more entries with VRML's type code: x-world/x-vrml. Click on the content type to display active and inactive plug-ins in the lower part of the chooser window.
For each active plug-in you don't want, click on the plug-in's name in the active list, then click on the red down-arrow to slide the plug-in to the inactive list. The chooser application automatically adds an underscore ( _ ) to the plug-in's DLL name. Similarly, to activate an inactive plug-in, click on the plug-in's name in the inactive list, then click on the red up-arrow to slide the plug-in to the active list. Once you have a VRML 2.0 browser installed, you should also adjust your screen settings to use 16-bit colors (also called High Color or 65535 colors). Do not use 8-bit colors (also called 256 colors), 24-bit colors or 32-bit colors (also called True colors). 8-bit colors give you too few colors to achieve smooth realistic shading when VRML worlds are drawn. 24-bit and 32-bit colors give you plenty of colors for shading, but the added colors require extra processing in your VRML 2.0 browser. That extra processing can significantly slow down the browser, reducing its interactivity.