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Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

No questions, just wanted to say thank you for helping to make gamedev actually fun again. I had no idea raylib existed till now. Unity and Unreal Engine have formed such a depressing monoculture that it’s no wonder gamedev has gone out of fashion in the last decade, and projects like yours help to rekindle it.

Oh, one question, I was hoping to convert a bunch of models to raylib’s format. Right now my exporter goes from Heroes of Newerth format to Collada. What would be the best way to import from there into raylib? (They’re rigged character meshes with 15+ animations for each, so it’s a bit tricky since there’s no universal simple format like obj.)

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Thank you very much! Glad you enjoy raylib! I know it's not that popular like the big engines but, actually, next month raylib will be 10 years old! :D

raylib supports several 3d model formats (obj, gltf/glb, iqm, m3d, vox), I think Blender has exporters for most of them. Note that some formats support must be enabled in raylib/src/config.h file!

Okay, I’ll try converting the meshes to iqm. Thanks.

I edited in some context — they’re rigged character meshes with animations, so a few formats are unusable here (like obj) since it can’t handle skeletons. Would you guess that iqm is the best one to look into out of the ones you listed? Otherwise I guess I’ll buckle up and look at all of them.

(Kind of sheepish that the only formats I’ve heard of are obj and m3d…)

Not author but if you're sharing these assets, distributing them in the gltf (json/ascii, not binary) format is really helpful, as it seems to quite easily be imported into tools like blender and threejs.

Awesome, thank you! That’s really helpful to know. The context is over here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36613343 but it’s basically 80 rigged characters with a dozen or so anims, along with normal/diffuse/specular maps. The aim is to distribute them as widely as possible into as many engines and programs as I can, but it’s been hard to figure out what people actually use for their art and engine pipelines nowadays. I’ll prioritize gltf.

> Unity and Unreal Engine have formed such a depressing monoculture.

That's because those got finished and shipped. There are a huge number of hobbyist small game engines that made it to about 80% of useful before the creator got bored. This is the "0.x" curse of open source. In the Rust gamedev world, it's said that there are five games and fifty engines.

In Rust land, if you want to do something that will get used, get behind WGPU, Bevy, and Rend3, and push. It won't be easy, because they've solved the easy problems and are now working on the hard ones. Progress is way too slow.

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