[Fluxus] more collada commits

[Dave Griffiths]

> On Nov 29, 2007 10:54 AM, Dave Griffiths <dave at pawfal.org> wrote:
>> Not yet, but the idea is to support collada as fully as possible.
>> It's a matter of time, next up is materials, followed by animation - I
>> guess physics will be after that.
>>
>> It's slow at the moment though, the moon buggy example takes around 10
>> seconds to load - the reason is that the geometry loading is doing a
>> _lot_
>> of processing to convert the data from multiple indices per vertex data
>> type to one uniform index for all vertex data types (which is optimal
>> for
>> rendering speed).
>>
>> I need to profile it again, but options are to live with it, rewrite
>> bits
>> of it in C++ or use Collada as an intermediate format and have a native
>> fluxus scene file which is laid out favorably to how fluxus works -
>> neither of which I particually like the sound of.
>
> I though the idea of collada WAS to be an intermediate format to carry
> as much as possible from package to package.

Yes, but I'm lazy, and writing code for two formats seems wrong. It would
be nice to just use collada I think (seeing as I don't have an existing
scene format to hang on to). It's probable I can speed it up a bit, there
are sure to be simple things I can do to avoid some big hits.

> In VGE we use scheme-based native format for scenes (and ogre formats
> for meshes, materials etc - because we use ogre for rendering). May be
> fluxus could use scheme for everything , may be with optional text
> friendly encoding for large chunks of binary data, and an external
> converter tool to convert from collada to that.

That's along the lines of what I was thinking, but the only part I would
really change is the way the geometry data is stored. fwiw the first thing
I do with the collada file is use xml.ss to convert it to a big sexpr, so
the rest could remain the same.

The alternative extreme is to use a binary format and write it all in C++,
this would be fastest and maybe would provide a good alternative to
collada rather than a slightly different ascii format. I'm not very keen
on binary 3D formats though.

btw - is VGE your scheme bindings for Ogre? is there anything we can
share? should we be using that instead of fluxus? :)

cheers,

dave