[ODE] XODE trimesh structure - please vote

[William Denniss]

On Tue, 2004-03-16 at 11:54, Chroma wrote:
> WD> This is an important issue and I would like to get as much feedback as
> WD> possible.  Already there have been arguments for several different ways.
> WD> The issue with storing the trimesh data is that you can either opt for
> WD> the XML way of doing it (ie. in XML tags) or using CDATA and making up
> WD> our own structure.
> 
> Personally I do not want to store the vertices/indices in the xode file
> at all. I'd rather use a filename reference to an external file, just
> like a mesh. There is already enough file format to store vertices and
> indices informations. U will have the same problem if u want to support
> the terrain geom.

The only problem with this is that then you drastically reduce the
interoperability of the format.  While developers have control over
their own code and can easily support whatever trimesh format the editor
uses, this may not be the case for the that they use editors.

For example if I take my truck from ODEEd and load it into Ezphysics -
and the latter doesn't use the same external trimesh data format as the
former, then it's a pain.  One of the really nice things with XODE will
be if people can move their scenes between editors without much pain. 
This means that you can chop and change if different editors have
different strong points.

We could pick one external format to use - but then we may as well just
integrate it into the standard.

I think it would be nice to fully support all ode objects in the
standard without requiring extra files, and that is really the goal of
the format.

There would be no problem in an editor for someone to say load a .3ds
file to extract the trimesh data however, I am all for that.

Regarding terrain - that is currently in the contributed section and not
in the ODE core am I right?  In that case I think it could have an
extension until the point when it is in the core.

Will.

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