[Verse-dev] AUX asset management spec.

[eskil at obsession.se]

Hi

There has been a lot of talk about asset management using verse  
lately. Part of it coming form Collada and some of it from Cristal  
Space. So I thought i would write a asset management spec to help  
people with this. So here it is, I would like to get some feedback on  
it. I am considering adding some more granularity like being able to  
define the status on data like UV, Texturing and so on. It may be good  
to be able to have some kind of spread sheet capability where you can  
see the status of the different assets. Beyond this Emil and I are  
working on a new version of the loader/saver that lets you save  
updates and be able to role back the content of a part or the entire  
verse scene. The first version of that should be out very soon.

Cheers

E

AUX asset management spec
-------------------------

When dealing with multiple users working on large data sets with many  
nodes, it can be good to manage these assets by tagging the nodes with  
various meta data. Here is a set of recommended tags. It is  
recommended that tools set as many of thees tags as possible  
automatically.

All the following tags should be in a tag group named "asset"

"sections"
Used for grouping content in to multiple layers. What is commonly  
reffed to as "layers" in 3D applications. For instance characters,  
landscape, and trees. This is used to allow users to hide parts of the  
data set that is not of interest.

"tool"
Text tag indicating the main tool used for the creation and  
modification of the node.

"author"
Text tag indicating the artist responsible for the creation of the node.

"assigned"
Text tag with the name of the person assigned to work on the data.

"approved"
This text  tag is set on any data that is final and approved, and the  
text string indicate who approved the data.

"version"
Version number of the data indicated as a real tag. Fractions are used  
to indicate minor changes and the integer part indicates major  
revisions.

"status"
Free text that describes the status of the node for instance: "model  
complete, missing UV".

"placeholder"
A tag set on quick mockup data used before the final data is constructed.

"library"
Library is used for grouping assets, not parts of scenes (like  
sections) For instance a library called "wood" can contain all wood  
material and textures.

"source"
A text or link tag that contains the file path, or link to text node  
containing the source data that was used for generating the data. Can  
be application specific files from a editing application.

"generated"
A tag set on all data that is generated by a specific tool and not by  
human hand, this can be a object that has a dependency associated with  
it that keeps it dependent on other data.

"alternative"
Same as "Source" but rather pointing to data that can be used as a a  
alternative representation of the node. It is recommended not to use  
this tag unless absolutely necessary since the data may easily become  
out of sync with the verse data. It is also worth remembering that no  
other tools will be able to parse this alternative representation. If  
used it is recommended to have a service that updates the alternative  
representation always to be in sync with the verse representation.

"file"
Once a asset has been exported to a file this tag indicates the path  
to that file. a node may have multiple file tags if the node is  
exported in to multiple versions.

"comment"
Free form text commenting the data.