[Bf-gamedev] Proposal to (try to) get better FBX support

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi all,

The goal of this list is to help developers to do their work.
It is not get into long winded discussions to sharpen your opinions.

Stay on topic please.

-Ton-

--------------------------------------------------------
Ton Roosendaal  -  ton at blender.org   -   www.blender.org
Chairman Blender Foundation - Producer Blender Institute
Entrepotdok 57A  -  1018AD Amsterdam  -  The Netherlands



On 17 Sep, 2014, at 18:51, Sam Brubaker wrote:

> @Jacob, I'm all in favor continued BGE development, and I also have a stake in the BGE more than any other engine, but that's another, longer discussion. Maintaining interoperability between Blender and other game engines should be a priority in the short term, seeing as many artists and game studios are finding it useful as an asset creation tool, and we want them to keep finding it useful. As long as there is energy behind this particular task, I support setting aside the BGE for now if we have to (as long as we still keep it warm).
> 
> @JCS, Your idea sounds sneaky. I like it. It would be so cool to "lock" everyone in to an open standard. For me, choosing an interchange format is like choosing whether to be shot in the hand or the foot, so I see plenty of room for improvement on this front.
> 
> On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 12:30 PM, Takanu <crocadillian at me.com> wrote:
> BGE is cool for what it is, but even in spite of the licensing issues, firstly its nice to have the flexibility to use different engines, as people have different working styles and preferences.  CG artists also have their preferences, and can regularly use multiple programs in their own workflow, so asking Blender game developers and artists to focus on one engine seems unfair.  Plus, it would mean losing support from those who enjoy using Blender as a tool to develop game art, and I’m sure there’s quite a few small to medium sized development teams that rely on it due to its unique position in the market and pretty sweet modelling tools. 
> 
> Secondly however, BGE is lacking in many features the major 3 engines support, including console and tablet platform support.  I’m sure some programmers with the expertise and drive could make porting options and other features available in the future, but a good chunk of game designers and studios just want to focus on design as much as possible when choosing a game engine over an in-house solution.  Avoiding the big business waffle some peeps like to use when discussing Blender as much as possible, BGE just isn't an attractive offer like Blender is as a modelling and CG tool, as the game development market is very different from the CG one - there are many high quality, easily accessible and cheap options for game engines and development software, and most of them are better, if not to a significant degree, to BGE.
> 
> I still think BGE is an awesome idea, but as it stands at the moment it’s not a viable option 😜
> 
> Sent from Windows Mail
> 
> From: Jacob Merrill
> Sent: ‎Wednesday‎, ‎17‎ ‎September‎ ‎2014 ‎16‎:‎57
> To: bf-gamedev at blender.org
> 
> Why not work on the bge?
> 
> with the exception of screen space normals, and efficient draw call batching, I don't see any fatal flaws with it,
> 
> What is stopping it from being great? it's not GPL, as far as I can tell, as most game developers are not writing anything that has not been done before, and if they are, it's not like someone can't copy the idea without access to the code.....
> 
> here is my own work in the engine, (almost alone at this point)
> this is a walking ragdoll, that supports both ik animation, and physical scene interaction,
> when bullet 3 hits the main stage as people upgrade video cards, you should in theory be able to run 100's of walking ragdolls.
> 
> why not a open project?
> (I am biased) but my own project looks pretty good :D
> 
> I have worked for a year on this for free.....:P
> 
> On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 8:01 AM, Toni Alatalo <toni at playsign.net> wrote:
> could Assimp help here? it has an internal format, and can read &
> write many formats to / from it. i don't know the format / internal
> structure but have understood that it's simple and straightforward and
> suitable for games.
> 
> afaik they have a json format now but are interested in a binary
> format as well. i've used the json format succesfully with three.js in
> a test (converted from fbx to assimp2json)
> 
> regarding Collada, glTF may address some of the problems by being a
> more restricted spec and by having an efficient binary format for the
> geom arrays (and json for other stuff, no xml). it might be even nice
> to just write glTF directly from Blender if the current solution of
> going via collada2gltf is problematic. at least those Khronos
> standards have open specs..
> 
> 2cently yours,
> ~Toni
> 
> On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 4:53 PM, Sam Brubaker <sam at worldsday.org> wrote:
> > @JCS, I really like your ideas here, but I still wonder if a "15th Standard"
> > might be more strategically sound, even if it's totally insane.
> >
> > My biggest concern about spending so many resources on FBX is that B-devs
> > would be working on something that does not belong to Blender or any
> > equivalent NFP organization. It belongs to Autodesk. Autodesk is free to
> > break its own format however it likes and nullify all the work we do
> > catching up, which is kind of scary. All FBX development on our end
> > indirectly helps a company that is not helping us at all.
> >
> > Of course, our goal should be utility for users, not vindictiveness;
> > improving FBX support may be our best move in the short term. But what about
> > the long term?
> >
> > On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 7:38 AM, Jens Christian Restemeier
> > <jens.restemeier at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> Another thought:
> >> What about porting Blender's FBX code into a clean C++ library, without
> >> dependencies on Blender or the official SDK? Blender could then use it
> >> through some Python bindings.
> >> Basically just a loader/writer, and a high level interface to go through
> >> the scenegraph or to build a scene graph. With an MIT or BSD style license
> >> to encourage people to use it over the official SDK.
> >>
> >> That we we have guaranteed interoperability with anyone using the library,
> >> and improvements benefit both Blender and applications using it.
> >> And it would open a way to sneak in a better format at a later point. You
> >> could define a clean legacy-free format, and any application that uses the
> >> API just needs a recompile to use it.
> >>
> >>
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