[ODE] XML ODE Data Interchange Format

[William Denniss]

On Sun, 2004-03-07 at 13:41, Steve Baker wrote:
> 
> 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.

My sentiments exactly.

> 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.

An interesting suggestion.  We could as you say add some extra
primitives to the the "graphical" components but in fact we might
already have a solution. 

One of the debug modes in my project simply takes the collision geometry
and create the 3D representation from them (ignoring my custom meshes
which are usually used instead).  I think this way makes a lot of sense
because the geometry is already defined for collision and so it's no
extra work.  It is also a pretty good approximation as the closer your
collision geometry mirror your meshes - the more realistic it will feel.

Adding a RGB colour attribute is a good idea, in fact perhaps bodies
should have colours associated with them as well - mainly for the editor
(most editors I have seen let you pick colours for objects).

Cheers,

Will.

---
William Denniss - will@ http://tanksoftware.com/