File formats?

Chet · Post by **Chet** » Mon Jan 04, 2010 3:21 am

Is there any advantage to various 3d model formats in terms of load and process times?
I notice the examples that use bsp seem to load (and run) a lot faster than the .x I am using for models.
Which formats are fastest and does anybody know of tools available to convert to them?

almondega · Post by **almondega** » Mon Jan 04, 2010 3:34 am

the load time will change for each file type, of course

but i guess the process time, after the mesh is loaded in memory, will be the same to all, since irr loads the model to its own mesh struct

Chet · Post by **Chet** » Mon Jan 04, 2010 5:38 am

Any ideas on which loads are faster and why? I can use a lot of different formats from blender (don't think bsp is one of them) and would like to optimize loading as much as possible.

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Mon Jan 04, 2010 10:32 am

Loading animated meshes takes longer (relative to the amount of geometry loaded) because they also load animation data. Text based file formats are mostly slower, due to the parsing overhead. But this is only for load times. Also, badly exported meshes can load significantly slower. It's usually best to profile some files and decide based on those figures. Main decision point should be the supported features, though. Some file formats don't support certain kinds of materials, which would be harder to fix than to have a slower loading time.