Quote:Original post by Spoonbender

Quote:Original post by zedz
theres nothing wrong with using collada (loading/parsing is fast enuf with most datasets)

It is slow. very slow. We used it for a small 1-month game project last year. We had plenty of engine-related problems, so our game ended up much simpler than we'd liked, which also meant that the amount of resources we needed to import via Collada was pretty small. And yet, loading the game took ~5 minutes, of which the majority was spent parsing XML files. Granted, it can probably be done faster, but XML *is* a lot slower than more compact formats. You don't want to have to go through too many megabytes of XML data every time you load your application.

I'm using Collada in my game, and the way I mitigate this is by storing a simple cache. The first time you load the game, the loader generates an MD5 hash and checks all meshes in the cache. If it finds a match, it loads the cached version (which is just a dump of binary vertex data, and very fast to load). If it doesn't, it loads the COLLADA file and generates a cached version for later use.

Every time I want to make a change to a mesh, I just modify the COLLADA file and the game automatically updates the cached version for later use.