[ODE] xml ODE format & gui editor progress?

[William Denniss]

Hi Mike,

On Sat, 2004-05-22 at 09:45, Mike Wuetherick wrote:

> I'm curious about the XML spec that was proposed for ODE.  Has this 
> developed any further? Is there a seperate website that is available to 
> monitor the development of this side of things specifically?

http://tankammo.com/xode/ but it's mainly just for file storage
currently.  I may create a very simple page just for news posts and a
listing of public XODE tools.

I am close to finishing a reference implementation of ODE which is
written for the Odejava (http://odejava.org/) project (Java ODE
bindings).  While creating this, and side by side creating a simulation
in Odejava I have been weeding out the  many problems with the spec. 
Once I have finished this I'll formally announce it, and more testing
can be done.  I think it will take a while to get to 1.0 as we want to
make sure all cases have been taken care of.

Hopefully in the near future (this weekend will help) I'll present a
beta consisting of:
* The Spec
* XML Schema
* XODE Test Suite
* Odejava reference implementation and simple XODE "viewer" which can be
used to load the various tests.

Hopefully someone who uses C/C++ and/or other languages used with ODE
will port my code (shouldn't be too hard) or code it from scratch.

If you want me be kept posted, email me off list or ping me occasionally
for an update.

> As well, regarding the GUI tools that were mentioned a while back, are 
> there people working on integrating the XML side of things into one or 
> more of these GUI tools (ideally an open-source version).  Just curious, 
> a few of our developers are creating a custom 3d modeler for our 
> internal game format and being able to do the physics mockup at the same 
> time (ala the GUI editors for ODE) would be very cool.

I am hoping some of the ODE GUI Editors will add XODE export
capabilities.  I don't think it's all that hard (certainly exporting is
easier than importing).

ODEEd (odeed.org) has a plugin feature so technically anyone could code
it.  I did speak to the author a while back and he indicated he might be
adding full XODE support, I'm not sure if that is still current.

I am pretty confident XODE will be well suited for use in rapid
development environment as it allows quick building of physics
structures and is independent to changes in the project code.  In final
production environments, the loading speed issue may come into play but
once a project is in this stage - a decision can be made to either
convert the XODE file into source code or use some binary format.

My reference implementation actually logs all calls to ODE for
debugging.  With a few hours work, someone could quick easily rig it to
print out actual ODE code.

Cheers,

Will.

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