x3d for games

Game Play & Game Design
#1

x3d has a couple of interesting features that could be use in games:

  • x3d binary encoding is said to be able tosave a lot of memory space and bandwidth, in particular when combining good compression algorithms with binary encoding

  • a well defined specification that includes everything needed to do games

  • schemas to read x3d xml encoded files

  • java bindings that can be used to create a scene-graph

  • a lot of good freeware modelers like Blender come with x3d exporters

Of course that this doens’t solve everything. Even if someone made a x3d loader for his own engine every loader would have to make a mapping of x3d nodes to nodes in the specific engine scenegraph and this would be a mess because the game creator would want to know how this mapping would be done and for that he would have to know how each specific engine internals work. One solution was to use x3d classes for the scene graph api defenition. This would solve two problems in a row.

I hope you guys consider taking advantage of x3d in games.

#2

What he said!

#3

I agree 100%

The most important aspect of it is it is a royalty free standard that can provide standardization for 3D model and behavior. Now with JOGL, OpenGL 2.0, new levels of processor and memory speeds at an affordable price, and next generation graphics cards the concept of a general purpose scene graph that can achieve game level performance is possible. Also with the ammendment to the specification that allows shader support along with its extension support through prototypes, the possiblities seem endless.

#4

I found an interesting site from a guy who as made some work on x3d:

http://www.cybergarage.org/

Most of his work is based on Java3d but it would be a start if someone wanted to pick up what he has already made and do it with jogl or lwjgl with added support for shaders.

And checkout the tool he has made to edit scenes:

http://www.cybergarage.org/vrml/ctb/java3d/index.html

He defines behaviors with a visual method (like building circuit diagrams). I think this stuff is very cool. We could build quick shaders, behaviors anything with this metod easly.