New file header strings were introduced with Open Inventor 8.0:

#Inventor V8.0 ascii [LE/BE]

#Inventor V8.0 binary [LE/BE]

The ivCat Open Inventor file converter (located in $OIVHOME/src/Inventor/tools/ivCat) provides a simple way to convert files from ASCII to binary from/to different version.

For instance, converting from 2.1 to to 8.0 can be done with the following command line:

%> ivCat -s \"#Inventor V8.0 ascii\" -o myFile.iv file.iv

Open Inventor 8.1 added support for reading and writing compressed Inventor format (.iv) files. Loading a compressed file is much faster, especially for large files, because fewer bytes need to be transferred from the physical disk or network.

Open Inventor supports the Deflate compression format, used by zlib and gzip. In order to compress a file, any software which supports gzip compression can be used.

The file extension “.ivz” is suggested for convenience, but compressed IV files don’t need any specific extension in order to be supported by Open Inventor. The compression detection is automatic and there is no need to add extra code to support compressed files. The class SoInput SoInput SoInput natively supports compressed files.

Compression management is performed by the classes SoInput SoInput SoInput and SoOutput SoOutput SoOutput . SoInput SoInput SoInput supports compressed IV files even when the streaming mode is enabled, but the “read from buffer” feature does not support compression at this time. The SoOutput SoOutput SoOutput class has been improved to compress the data on-the-fly. In order to write a compressed file a new file property can be set in any SoOutput SoOutput SoOutput based object.

SoOutput fileOutputInterface;
fileOutputInterface.setFileProperty( SoOutput::CompressedZlib );

SoOutput fileOutputInterface = new SoOutput();
fileOutputInterface.SetFileProperty( SoOutput.FileProperties.CompressedZlib );

SoOutput fileOutputInterface = new SoOutput();
fileOutputInterface.setFileProperty( SoOutput.FileProperties.CompressedZlib );

All applications that use SoInput SoInput SoInput can read compressed files, including the SceneViewer, LargeModelViewer and IvTune.

Open Inventor is now able to read a file and create the scene graph in parallel in order to accelerate large file loading. In the asynchronous loading mode, a separate thread reads the file in blocks and each time a new block of data is available the main thread creates the scene graph for that block while the reader thread loads the next block.

The number of buffers and the size of a buffer can be configured using the following environment variables:

To enable or disable asynchronous loading use the new (optional) third parameter of SoInput SoInput SoInput ::openFile, Example:

myInput->openFile( “myFile.iv”, FALSE, TRUE );

Progress loading a file can now be monitored using the SoInput SoInput SoInput class. To do so, the application must create its own class derived from SoInput SoInput SoInput and implement the method:

SoInput::updateReadPercent( double readPercent )

This method is called periodically during a file read operation to update the progress. The readPercent parameter ranges from 0 to 100. This example shows how it could be done with a Qt progress bar:

class MyInput : public SoInput
  {
  public:
    MyInput( QProgressBar* pgb ) : SoInput()
    {
      m_pgbPtr = pgb;
    }

    ~MyInput() {};

    virtual void updateReadPercent( double readPercentage )
    {
      m_pgbPtr->setValue( int(readPercentage) );
    }

  private:
    QProgressBar* m_pgbPtr;
  };
        

class MyInput : SoInput
{
  private ProgressBar myProgressBar;

  public MyInput(ProgressBar pgb) : base()
  {
    myProgressBar = pgb;
  }

  public virtual void updateReadPercent(double readPercentage)
  {
    myProgressBar.Value = (int)readPercentage;
  }
}
      

class MyInput extends SoInput
{
  private JProgressBar myProgressBar;

  public MyInput(JProgressBar pgb)
  {
    super();
    myProgressBar = pgb;
  }

  public void updateReadPercent(double readPercentage)
  {
    myProgressBar.setValue((int)readPercentage);
  }
}