Comment by elisee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by elisee | Hacker News Reader

The post mentions OpenGEX as a game engine data exchange format. If you're interested in 3d data formats and specifically good runtime formats, you might be interested in glTF too, which is a JSON+binary asset format specifically targeted at storing runtime-optimized data (as opposed to COLLADA which is more a editing-oriented format). It's backed by the Khronos group --the people behind OpenGL / Vulkan / WebGL-- and they have a COLLADA-to-glTF converter: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF.

Having spent some time working with the format, I hope it takes off and we see native support for it in most tools at some point. I've had great success using glTF to export models + skeletal animations from Blender and then import them for use with WebGL: https://twitter.com/elisee/status/558238454962978816. This is a little test project made with Superpowers, a soon-to-be open source HTML5 2D+3D game maker I've been designing with a couple of friends: https://sparklinlabs.com/

Indeed, I'm well aware of glTF, and it's a cool initiative. Just didn't want to overwhelm readers with new stuff.

Also, even though it doesn't have the same backing yet, I'm more optimistic about OpenGEX as an exchange format because it's not such a big ask. It serves the same purpose as FBX, but is completely open source. glTF on the other hand - and please enlighten me if I got this all wrong - is asking engines that already have their own tailor-made runtime format to support this one as well (or even instead). That's asking a lot.

I guess if glTF could convert FBX files as well as it converts COLLADA, it'd quickly become a lot more attractive. Maybe support glTF output in fbx-conv?

https://github.com/libgdx/fbx-conv

Looks like a FBX-to-glTF converter has sprung up recently (linked from the glTF repo README: https://github.com/cyrillef/FBX-glTF). I have no experience with it though so I can't say how well it works.

> glTF on the other hand - and please enlighten me if I got this all wrong - is asking engines that already have their own tailor-made runtime format to support this one as well (or even instead). That's asking a lot.

For our Superpowers game maker, we didn't end up using glTF as the actual runtime format but we have a fairly simple importer that reads glTF, scavenges for what it needs and builds the final data. I expect most engines would still need a "last-mile" conversion, still some processing but much simpler than working with COLLADA or FBX directly.

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