FBX support and other helpfull stuff

[zielin]

Hi,

I've been searching information about fbx support in Irrlicht and I have found nothing special. I have noticed, that FBX support is'nt in trunk. I think that FBX format is very good idea to implement in Irrlicht because it has good Autodesk's support and scenes exported with it should be properly loaded. It's problematic to work with engine which needs many conversions from one format to another to achieve final model which requires correction because of loss of details during conversions. I want to share my experience about my last project which was successfully completed because I had professional modeler who knows Modo and and created well organized meshes in OBJ format. Second modeler, who worked in Blender, was creating invalid OBJ files which required correction. Each of them say that in case of FBX files, there won't be so many problems.
Moreover I think, that many other things should be integrated with Irrlicht. Maybe its wrong with this engine's idea, but there should be more non-graphical stuff integrated around this project. Irrbullet is selfexisting project totally separated from Irrlicht releases, network support practically doesn't exists. Maybe it's a good time to think about this??

I have some ideas and solutions for networking (not dedicated for Irrlicht). It's based on UDP for message producers and consumers. I have also pretty good stuff to realize network communication over ActiveMQ broker for bigger projects.

Thanks for attention.

[kklouzal]

Hello, you have to remember that Irrlicht is a 3D Engine and not a Game Engine ;)
.FBX support is definitely something that could eventually get included into Irrlicht core, however, as far as I can tell there are only two or three main developers working on Irrlicht, that being said while a wider range of file types being supported is always welcomed it's not always feasible to add such support based on the request of one user ;)
On the other hand if you or someone else was to put fourth a patch with the ability to load such said files it would most likely find it's way into the engine as long as it did not interfere with anything already established and working. :)

As far as networking goes, there are plenty of established networking libraries out there that focus all of their effort on improving that which they have built themselves around, networking, just as Irrlicht focuses all of their effort on what it has been built around, 3D Rendering, the same goes for Physics.

There are pros and cons around separating the core functions of your Game Engine into seperate librarys for 3D, Networking, Physics, etc..
One pro is such that you have the ability to cherry pick exactly what you want/need and piece it together in a fashion that works for you.
One con is the problem with integration, some things would be better integrated directly into the 3D part of your engine, such as physics, as that allows you direct access to the objects you want to simulate physics with.
It's sometimes tough finding a balance ;)

I hope this helps

[mongoose7]

Loaders don't have to be in the core SDK. Anyone can write an FBX loader for their own code. However, if the post was suggesting that someone else should write one, well ....

[hendu]

If you search the forum, you'll find the fbx SDK has license issues, so a loader using it cannot become integrated.

[zielin]

hendu: I was wondering about it and now got response.
kklouzal, moongoose7: I could write loader for FBX, no problem, but i think it's more complicated because of Irrlicht project organisation. I think there should be subprojects under Irrlicht project, separated by functionality, destination or licensing issues. Maybe plugin system for loaders could resolve some issues?
Take look at Havok engine. There are spearated modules for vision and physics, but there is no problem to integrate them into one project to cooperate. Irrlicht is very very good oranised because of using interfaces everywhere and it could make simplier implementation of it.

[mongoose7]

There *is* a plugin system for loaders. And hendu already wrote that an FBX loader cannot be a subproject of Irrlicht.

[hybrid]

But we have an FBX loader in irrext, which does not use the SDK. We can also add such a loader without being compiled into the binaries, and being disbaled by default. So if there's some really working loader (the one in irrext does no animations IIRC) we could think about it. Please note, though, that usually new formats will only make it into the SDK if both loaders and savers are available. Might be possible with the SDK, though.