[ODE] XML ODE Data Interchange Format

[Steve Baker]

William Denniss wrote:

> Driven by my own need for importing an ODE scene described by XML, I
> have developed a draft XML ODE format named 'XODE' which I am proposing
> as a standard and request comments.

Awesome!  I'm glad someone finally found the time to start this ball
rolling.

> Based on what I have seen in the current breed of editors and of ODE
> itself, I took the view that the ODE scene is generally broken into
> three components - the bodies (ie. physics objects), geom (ie. collision
> objects) and 3D meshes.  The first two are standard but the last can
> vary enormously between editors and projects.  Therefore I did not
> attempt to define the display components at all, and simply have a
> "mesh" tag with a name, position and scale.  It is then up to the
> importer to determine how to interpret the name (and actually get the
> data) - or to use an extension.

I havn't read your description yet - but perhaps I might make a
suggestion about the 3D meshes?

I don't think the ODE file format should venture into the domain of
also being a 3D file format - since many applications will place
far more demands on their 3D models than the ODE team would want to
support.

However, rather than completely punting on the issue, I would suggest
that a very few basic shapes be defined to approximate the geometry
of the 3D viewable mesh - eg Cuboid, Spheroid, Cylinder - with a simple
RGB colour for each.

This would enable physics editing packages to have at least some kind
of 3D representation to use when displaying the model for user interaction.

The final application can then choose to ignore that representation and
instead attach 3D geometry loaded from elsewhere.   All that's really
needed is a way to associate the matrices coming from ODE's view of the
world with the matrices in the 3D rendering.

---------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------
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