Hello forum,
I want to load models in a format that supports skeletal animations into opengl.

The formats that I problably want to load are: dae (collada) or iqm/ iqe.
I already checked md5 but at the moment I don't care to much about it.

My problems are:
1. I don't want to use libraries like assimp, collada dom, fcollada or opencollada. So were do I find good examples I knew a site called wazim or similar, but I can't find it anymore
2. I don't know how to parse binary files like iqm/ iqe, are they just zeros and ones?

Thank you.

I nearly parsed md5 completly, but than I tought about loading a much easier format like collada.
I am writing in C++ and iqm/ iqe seems to me much more complex than md5.

Here is the link you were talking about:

http://www.wazim.com..._Tutorial_1.htm

In any case, you want to have some sort of asset conditioning pipeline where you take in an interchange format like .dae and bring it into your own runtime format for your game/engine. How your engine manages its content at runtime is another story.

I attempted to go the approach you did and write my own collada parser. I got it working, but it wasn't robust at all. I find the incredible amount of a variance in the .dae format extremely frustrating and ended up switching to using Assimp for my .dae models. It is great. Nice clean interface, very robust, and much faster than my own parser for optimizing vertex indices. I'd recommend attempting to roll your own like I did, once you get it working for just 1 instance of the .dae format you will understand the format so much more and will feel more comfortable transitioning to Assimp.

Here is a fantastic tutorial if you decide to switch to Assimp:

http://ogldev.atspac...tutorial38.html

It also teaches you how to skin on the GPU, instead of the CPU like wazim's.

I totally agree with you, I just want to learn how I can do skeletal animations in OpenGL. And don't start immediately with libraries. So how did you start with you're personal loader?

Find yourself an XML parser, I used rapidxml from http://rapidxml.sourceforge.net/ , it seemed lightweight, then again I haven't much experience parsing XML files so definately look around yourself, here would be a good starting point: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/170686/best-open-xml-parser-for-c

Definately look at wazim's article for a nice introduction to the .dae file format and how to approach it.