[ODE] XML Formats

[Jon Watte (ODE)]

Justin Couch wrote:
>
> Heh. That's what HLA is supposed to be for :) Yeah, we've got feet in 
> that pie too.
>
>   

Not really. HLA actually makes simulation interoperability more 
cumbersome than DIS, because it does not specify a base FOM. DIS 
interoperability is a lot simpler and more straightforward. There is 
also no HLA wire standard, meaning that an HLA-based "simulation web" is 
pretty much a non-starter. But I digress.


>   
>> Does it make sense for ODE to be able to consume both X3D and Collada?
>>     
>
> Being biased, it would be great if it could. However, as I said before, 
> you really want to limit exactly how much of X3D you intend to support. 
> There's no need to handle the volume rendering component, for example. 
>   


The consensus on the list has been that these kinds of things are great 
as add-on libraries, but should not be part of ODE proper. ODE should 
not add dependencies on external libraries (we include the libraries for 
which we add dependencies), and it should not stray into rendering, 
shading, file I/O, etc, leaving those things to other, complementary 
libraries.

Cheers,

          / h+