[Plib-devel] PLIB/PPE loaders/writers - Authors README!

[Steve B. <sjb...@ai...>]

OK, OK!  My head is spinning.

For some reason after about a year of me begging for people to
write loaders/writers for SSG, we seem to be utterly deluged
in offers to write these things.

I'm really concerned that there may be people duplicating effort
here, so could I ask everyone who is writing either a loader or
a writer for PPE/SSG 3D formats to email me personally in the
next day or two.

I'll put together a coherent list of who is working on what and
post it to both PPE and PLIB developers' lists.

Just so everyone knows, the *CURRENT* list of really solidly
working loaders and writers that are distributed with PLIB are:

.ssg: Author: Steve Baker  sjb...@ai...
      IMPORT Status: Complete and tested.
      EXPORT Status: Complete and tested.
      Description: The 'native' format for SSG
      that saves a scene graph exactly - with
      every last field read and written perfectly.

.ac : Author: Steve Baker  sjb...@ai...
      IMPORT Status: Complete and tested.
      EXPORT Status: Not complete.
      Description: The native format of the
      'AC3D' shareware modeller

.3ds: Author: Per Liedman  li...@ho...
      IMPORT Status: Seems to be complete.
      EXPORT Status: Not attempted.
      Description: One of the formats provided by 3D Studio.

.wrl: Author: Various
      IMPORT Status: Several people have offered loaders, but
                     so far, none of them seem to work reliably.
      EXPORT Status: Not attempted.
      Description: VRML - the 'official' format for 3D models
      on the WWW. Comes in two flavors 'VRML' and 'VRML-2'
      (aka VRML-97).

...so - someone help me fill in the blanks!  If you are only
"thinking about" writing a loader/writer rather than "definitely"
writing one, let me know that too.

If you want to add your code to the PLIB CVS archive, please sign
up for an account at SourceForge.net and I'll give you write-access
to the PLIB CVS site.

If you are only subscribed to the PPE developers list, then please
subscribe to the PLIB developer's list and keep loader/writer
questions on that list so we can all compare notes.

One thing we'll want to look at is the current SSG Optimiser and
triangle-stripper.  They are both currently part of the AC3D loader,
but I know for sure that most (if not all) of the other loaders
would benefit from such a service.  Those functions could do with
some work though - neither of them are exactly perfect yet.

-- 
Steve Baker                  http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
sjb...@ai... (home)  http://www.woodsoup.org/~sbaker
sj...@ht...      (work)