Aki and Toni both make some very good points, and supporting the FBX and Collada formats (industry standards) would be great for Game Developers and modelers. Ogre is great, but it sure would be nice to support FBX and Collada formats as well.
How we would do this, no idea (at this point), but it certainly does deserve a discussion in the developer's thread. Could this possibly be added to the realXtend Road Map as well Jani? At least ear mark both of these ideas (FBX and Collada format support) and then maybe we can have further discussions on this in separate threads as to how we could implement these two formats from within realXtend/OpenSim. I think this would be extremely useful for the Game Developers. (I could see how this sure would make their life easier). I would need to take a look around and do some hunting and poking, and see if there are any open source "converter" projects that maybe we could piggy back off of, and implement into OpenSim/realXtend project. I did find this thread on the Ogre forums, so it seems that some Game Developers are somewhat desperate to have this feature added: http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2addons/viewtopic.php?t=8513 I supposed it would be a good feature to add to realXtend, to include native support for these formats, or possibly create some form of converter/importer. It does sound like a very valid and interesting point, and I'm sure the Gaming Developers would probably love support for FBX and Collada formats. Not sure how hard it would be to implement, but it might be good to support several input formats (i.e. FBX and Collada) as importers. FBX is a good "cross platform" format, and exporting from Blender to FBX seems to work even with the XBOX 360/XNA. So by using a standard like FBX, at least game developers could develop games that would work in realXtend, as well as in Playstation and XBOX 360 (using FBX with XNA). It might save the Game Developer some grief. Again, I don't know FBX well myself, but I could see having realXtend/ OpenSim supporting a very interoperable format like FBX would be very good for the game developers. I know FBX is owned by Alias (through an acquisition of FBX's creator, Kaydara), and it's unknown as to whether FBX will be replaced by Collada. I think Alias was bought out by Autodesk, so it's hard to tell what the fate of FBX will be. It may be a dead end, but I believe a developer is/was working on an FBX viewer for Ogre. You can check out this thread here on the Ogre forums: http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=14301&highlight=&sid=ce193664e1d3d7c4af509e6f4e2718c6 Thanks, Mark On Jul 2, 6:28 am, Toni Alatalo <[email protected]> wrote: > Pas-2 kirjoitti: > > > supporting some ready established interchange format? > > (..) > > Using FBX instead of ogre mesh would allow importing of whole complex > > scenes including materials, textures, animations, object hierarcy > > (most important thing) and even character animation. Also it would > > FBX might be good, I don't know it well at all myself, but certainly > supporting something for complete scenes and something interoperable > across engines would be good. > > One other possible format is Collada, which is a kind of open / industry > standard for game content - originally developed by Sony (and AFAIK is > the Playstation content pipeline format). Collada is usually used in the > XML form, ColladaXML. It also supports the different entities mentioned > above, and they have looked into even first steps to including AI in the > spec somehow.http://www.collada.org/.. hosted by Chronos, which > manages the OpenGL standard as well. One reason why I haven't started > using Collada in our own games (which we make using Ogre) is the size of > XML files - for us it is simpler and more efficient just to use the Ogre > formats directly. I suppose FBX is more optimal so it would not have > that prob., but I think some people here are ready to trade performance > for interoperability. > > Anyway to have stuff authored as FBX or Collada running in Rex, and > hence Ogre, it currently needs to be converted anyway to OpenSim scenes > and Ogre meshes. As long as that is so it is in a way not a big deal to > support even several input formats, as importers. At least for Collada > there are existing importers for Ogre (some sort of OgreColladaPlugin), > and it may be the same for FBX. For OpenSim they are just now talking > about their XML scene format(s) on opensim-dev, I guess importing > FBX/Collada scenedata to OpenSim would mean either writing an opensim > importer for those, or a translator that converts FBX/Collada to the > OpenSim format. > > Refactoring the whole thing so that it would somehow use e.g. FBX or > Collada (or X3D..) internally would be a bigger thing .. and I'm not > sure what it would mean even, as opensim has it's own scene structure > anyway and the viewer loads ogre meshes anyway etc. > > But perhaps supporting import&export for/to such common/standard formats > would help you. Or alternatively getting OpenSim scene XML format > support for your modelling application, and export tools that would > automatically create both those files and the Ogre meshes. > > > Aki Kivirinta > > ~Toni --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ this list: http://groups.google.com/group/realxtend realXtend home page: http://www.realxtend.org/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
