Just to clarify, those are some of the terms I heard from the AD end whenever someone brought this issue up.
Like Ciaran said, this request has been brought up frequently. Anyone involved with trouble-shooting knows the benefits of having ASCII files, just need to convince the devs. On 28 January 2013 15:33, Ponthieux, Joey <[email protected]> wrote: > On 1/28/2013 9:29 AM, Stefan Andersson wrote: > > Hello Everyone, > > Something that is bothering me, and has been bothering me for a long > while, is the constant use of binary files in Softimage. > > > 3.) scn files > Would be most helpful if this also could have THE OPTION of being ascii. > > > > -- > *Stefan Andersson | Digital Janitor* > blog <http://sanders3d.wordpress.com> | showreel<http://vimeo.com/sanders3d>| > twitter <http://twitter.com/sanders3d> | > LinkedIn<http://www.linkedin.com/in/sanders3d>| cell: > +46-73-6268850 | skype:sanders3d > > > > > Second that! > > Why? > > I've been writing out Maya .ma files for almost 12 years. That would have > been 14 years except in 98 and 99 I did not have the foresight to > understand that Maya's binary .mb files might need to be edited. On rare > occasions we ran into scene files that would get corrupted or otherwise > take a mind of their own. ASCII .ma files could be edited and the scene > resurrected, an activity that occurred more frequently as the files got > really large. > > Other reasons? Old scene files(decade old), and which were not corrupted, > but had old texture file links that were no longer valid could be edited to > relink the textures to their new location. Old .ma file, new file server, > Perl script, no problem. > > The loss of hard disk space and extra time to load .ma files became > trade-offs that were well worth the investment. As an added advantage > interrogating the .ma scene structure yielded vast amounts of interesting > information about Maya internals and structure. It was after all nothing > but a huge Mel file. > > An example of a significant benefit? I once wrote a material file > converter for Wavefront TAV .mtl files to Maya. Something Alias Wavefront > never created...go figure. I used a .ma file to decipher what the materials > should look like in Maya and converted the .mtl files straight to .ma. > Without the ASCII scene information from the .ma file it would have been > practically impossible to accomplish. > > With this habit somewhat ingrained, I have often wondered what a Softimage > scene file would look like in ASCII. I would welcome this capability in > Softimage. > > Going back even farther, I had my own database management tools written in > Perl for Softimage 3D back in the day. So having ascii access to > dsprojectinfo would also be useful. As would the other files. Granted I > can understand the performance issues related to having some of these files > as ascii, but each should be optional. > > Joey Ponthieux > LaRC Information Technology Enhanced Services (LITES) > Mymic Technical Services > NASA Langley Research Center > > ____________________________________________________________ > Opinions stated here-in are strictly those of the author and > do not represent the opinions of NASA or any other party. > > >
