Greetings! I was wondering, is there any standard mesh api out there? I mean an independent thing. What I want to do is write some converters/file readers that would all point to a unified mesh api and continue from there on. What I would like to have is: - Dynamic vertex arrays (Vertices, Normals, UV) - Material managed buffers - Weights & Bones - Texture filenames... Some game formats are allready indexed and some are not. It would be great if someone could just push vertices,faces and bones to that structure. Maybe something like that exists and its DirectX/OpenGL independant? I do not like D3DX Mesh functions too much, because Loading and Saving hierarchal .X files is pure horror. I have written a lot of parsers and I would like to fit into a more standard way. For example, if you change the game engine, you do not have to rewrite your mesh or copy and merge it into your project. You could just include the mesh api like a directx or opengl library.

Why don't you write it yourself? It sounds like you know exactly what you want and like you allready have experience doing it...

In the worst case I will write it myself. But I would like to know if anything like that exists. Maybe it has some additional features like vertex welding and so on. Maybe there is a standard. That would be nice. Standard for adding vertices, faces, bones, vertex weights and so on. I do not want to play arround with buffers every time i want to access a new file format.

I'm working since some months about the mesh api you're talking about,
it habdles pretty much everything you may ask from a mesh api , plus many optimizations( spelling ?? ) for the mesh itself , vertex connectivity, triangle connectivity, removal of duplicated and redundant vertices .
It's not yet finished, since i want to add lod , and skeletal animation based on real physics , not 'predone' animations.
It will be free along the sdk for non commercial use.
have a look here
http://www.gameprog.it/?action=vetrina&id=5
it's in italian though .

Yes its supports triangle strip and fan optimization, the mesh is compiled into this special format and rendered with a dedicated function.
I want to introduces triangle strip only optimization and i'm about to add in a few days.