aanderse wrote:the topic of an irrlicht mesh format has been covered
yes? where?
aanderse wrote:the problem is that people are too busy and the time people do spend on the engine most find more valuable to spend time on things other than an irrlicht 3d mesh format
considering that a very large majority of Irrlicht users are students and hobbists, it makes sense because they can make do with limited and obsolete formats. Their requirements are not the same as that of a professional project being undertaken by a large company, where price is usually not a big issue and mostly industry-standard tools are used. The question to ask is, does the irrlicht community want to reach out to those AA users? Or is everyone happy keeping Irrlicht as a hobbyst engine?
aanderse wrote:i think it would take someone showing up saying "hey, here is a fully tested patch to include a brand new 3d format with ALL the code already written" :-p
I strongly doubt that would ever happen, as its not a one-man job
Very different skill-sets are required to put all of this together. Of course, someone way more experienced than me is welcome to prove me wrong
CuteAlien wrote:Personally I rather work on things like improving the Collada-support as it allows exchanging data with way more applications than any custom engine-format. And support for that already improved in 1.8 (a little for import, a lot for export) and will most likely get some more improvements as there's another patch in the pipeline.
With all due respect, shoot the guy who told you collada is meant for real-time rendering. As for exchanging data with lots more applications, its mostly google-backed propaganda than anything and even if it was true that is not what a game really requires. If you were building a general-purpose world-editor or something similar then yes, you could utilize it. Let me ask you a straight question. Have You personally ever built an entire professional game that has been marketed and which is using collada as file format? I know you couldn't have, cause no one can
Even if you ignore the fact that collada is only a data-exchange format and was never meant to be used as the actual render format, working with collada is hell on earth, and not just in blender. And thats because of the open nature of the fromat, meaning no one has a final say on how it should be implemented. Take 2 different collada exporters for the same DCC tool and export the same mesh, you will get two very different files. There are too many more arguments I could provide against collada, but I think you get the picture.
What Irrlicht really needs is its OWN set of file formats. An efficient binary mesh format. A material definition format, preferably xml based. And, depending on the strategy, perhaps also a seperate skeleton file format, also preferably xml based.
But this is not enough! Creating these file-formats would be easy. The real challange is to constantly keep all the exporters for all major DCC tools in the market up-to-date because trust me, 90% of the professional 3d artsits upgrade to the latest version of their favourite DCC tool as soon as its available and they expect your exporter to still work seamlessly.
Since this is a lot of work, a common strategy employed is to actually sell the exporters for commerical DCC tools for a reasonable price, lets say something like 150€ to 250€. Anyone using a commerical tool like Max or Maya would have no problem spending that amount of money on a ready-made fully functional exporter. Its peanuts. The revenue thus generated is used to support ongoing development and ensure that exporters are always up-to-date. Remember, your file-format is only as good and as usable as the exporters for it.
