[ODE] XML ODE Data Interchange Format (revised)

Tue Mar 9 12:58:52 MST 2004

Hi All,

I have made some revisions to the spec which is up to revision 04 (the
first public revision was 03).

The new version can be found here:  http://tankammo.com/xode/xode.txt

The old version can now be found archived here:
http://tankammo.com/xode/xode.1.03.txt

I am also getting a list of "common" extensions which aim to solve the
most common needs not catered for by the standard tag set.  These are
listed here (but are NOT part of the spec!):
http://tankammo.com/xode/xode-extensions.txt

Some of the changes are as follows:

* Removed <mesh> attribute and clarified position on storing the
graphical meshes.
* Changed structure of <geom> and <joint> in how they reflect what type
of geom or joint it is.
* Grouped nodes into ODE objects, which include <body>, <geom>, and
<joint> and "collection" objects which contain ODE objects and include
<world>, <group> and <body>.  Read the intro to sections 2.1 and 2.2 for
more information.
* Better defined how the transforms work

The spec is far from complete - but I want to make sure we have reached
consensus on the design decisions to avoid me having to rewrite large
parts of it which is rather time consuming.

One question I would like to ask the community is how should we best
represent the trimesh geom in XML?  I guess something like this could
work:

<vertices>
0,0,3,
4,5,2,
2,3,5
2,3,4
</vertices>

<indices>
1,3,5,2,7,6,3,4,8,9,0,10,2,4,5
</indices>

One option would be:

<vertices>
  <vertex x="0" y="0" z="3" />
  <vertex x="4" y="5" z="2" />
  <vertex x="2" y="3" z="5" />
</vertices>

and

<indices>
  <index>1</index>
  <index>3</index>
  <index>4</index>
</indices>

But that bloats the file size a lot.  I guess we could even allow for
both representations if need be.

Cheers,

Will.

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