[ODE] ODE GUI Editor #2...

[William Denniss]

On Wed, 2004-02-25 at 22:41, Amund Børsand wrote:
> William Denniss <lists at omegadelta.net> skreiv:
> 
> > great, nothing wrong with some healthy competition.
> 
> > I like the fact that 4Link can load .3ds files were as ezphysics is
> > limited to it's own format (which appears to be a serialized ogre
> > file?).  However XML is much easier to code an importer for.  Do you
> > have any plans for an Xml/text based exporter?
> 
> I have lots of plans. :D But they all take time to implement... and I
> have little spare time these days. Right now 4link uses a binary format
> which just stores the object names and file names, and loads objects
> from the original .3ds files when you load a .4ip ("4link-in-progress")
> file, my thoughts being that if the mesh is half finished, the sim would
> automatically reload it the next time, and I don't have support for
> materials and multiple textures from the 3ds yet, which would be lost
> when saving. The plan is a compressed file format that keeps everything
> in one file, maybe zipped/compressed somehow, ready to distribute on the
> net when you've created something that needs to be shared. I've also
> thought of supporting Racer's formats directly, as they have so many
> nice textured meshes, with lots of useful physics data like engine
> torque curves, gear ratios, tyre data etc.
> 
> But XML? Hmm... I don't know. Do I really need it? The only advantage I
> see is that if you have a corrupt file you could fix it with a text
> editor. But as long as there is GUI for all functions you'd never need
> to edit the text, and then it'll only take more disk space. ?

I was more thinking of here how to easily import the simulation into a
custom ODE application :)  Being able to read some text format is nicer
as (among other things) it can be self-documenting and easy to parse - 
and XML is one such choice.

I'm not suggesting you would need to read in this format - just export
:)

Cheers,

Will.