Custom storage method for .mesh and .material files

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white_waluigi
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Custom storage method for .mesh and .material files

Post by white_waluigi »

My Idea is to have a <meta> or <custom> tag for storing custom information or metadata about the mesh. Where one could store size, physical properties (friction, weight), or other game specific stuff. And something similar for .material, for instance sound and particle effect when it gets shot, a tag for spawing grass on top off the material (like for instance when you got a grass material ontop of which you want to spawng grass billboards (i think goldsource had something in that direction) ).
The data would then be accessed by a .getTag(string) method for mesh and material objects.

That way, Ogres ground framework becomes a lot more expeandable, so far you would have to make .mesh.pyhs or .material.shot file, which you would have to load for yourself, which is in my opinion unnnecessary work, which should be avoided.
I could Imagine though it could be problematic for the OgreXMLConverter to take custom xml tags into account, but i think there is a way to deal with that.

It would also be kinda neat, if you could only load meta information of a mesh, inorder for example, to check if an object is near the player enough to be streamed in.

For example if a parkbench and a skyscraper mesh are near the player in a similar position, it makes more sense to only load the skyscraper, which is more likely to be seen by the player.
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c6burns
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Re: Custom storage method for .mesh and .material files

Post by c6burns »

I feel that while this is not a bad idea, it's an idea along the lines of turning Ogre into a game platform as opposed to a renderer. You should be handling all these issues as part of your framework and not necessarily within Ogre.
white_waluigi
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Re: Custom storage method for .mesh and .material files

Post by white_waluigi »

Just to make things clear: I dont want to store meta information by default into the mesh file, i just would like the possibiity to store stuff in it and the read it using the ogre mesh class. And I don't see how that could turn ogre into a game engine. Something similar is even already possible in the .scene file format.
While i knida see your point i still think of ogre as a baseplattform for game or other 3d engines. And as such i think it should be as expandable and customizable as possible (which very much already is). So why would it go against the ogre philoophy? Because I din't realy understand that.
And I think implementing this functianlity into a custom fork of Ogre would be kinda tedious, since every new version would have to be adapted and would require rewritng the xmlconverter, the mesh class, the mesh serialitiser, the mesh interpreter.
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Faranwath
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Re: Custom storage method for .mesh and .material files

Post by Faranwath »

I like the way this sounds, although some users may have a different mindset. However, I would like to point out the following: when requesting a feature, it'd be best to actually implement it and then contributing the code. If the final result proves to work and has acceptable quality, I don't see why the developers would reject it.

Thing is, everyone is busy doing something all the time, and since no financial revenue comes from maintaining Ogre, it's all done out of pure love.
white_waluigi wrote:And I think implementing this functianlity into a custom fork of Ogre would be kinda tedious, since every new version would have to be adapted and would require rewritng the xmlconverter, the mesh class, the mesh serialitiser, the mesh interpreter.
That's exactly why it should be integrated... by someone.
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c6burns
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Re: Custom storage method for .mesh and .material files

Post by c6burns »

I agree with Faranwath, contributing code is always better than contributing ideas :D Ideas are overrated!
white_waluigi wrote:i still think of ogre as a baseplattform for game or other 3d engines
I don't think of it that way at all. I have my own platform which doesn't necessarily rely on Ogre, and I assume most people working on substantial projects have the same. It's just a renderer to me ... there's no physics or audio or networking .... and there actually shouldn't be. It's totally focused on rendering which I think is perfect because it's already a large codebase for the team to maintain. Yes it has other features beyond rendering, but on close inspection they are really there to support rendering. I don't see an overwhelming reason that you need to modify Ogre's mesh format to store non-rendering related data when you could easily do this another way, but if that's your jam then go for it.
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