Models formats (POLL)

I have no news about the projects that I started in the past days. The scheduled activities are delayed, but I hope to find more time for their development soon.
Anyway, now it's the time for a new poll. Since the available time is limited and I want to improve the engine especially for what regards features really used, I want to ask about the animated models formats that are going to be used in your projects.

As you know, the model format currently supported are: Cal3D (the well known library), MD2 (Quake2 format), MD3 (Quake3 format), MDL (Half-Life 1 format) and MS3D (MilkShape3D format). There are also 3DS and OBJ, but they are not animated (at least not in the flavor that the engine supports). If you want that some of them are the one improved first (I mean higher rendering speeds and better final results), vote them. Then I add also to the list the X (DirectX) and MD5 (Doom3) formats, that are not supported yet, but I have found in the past source code that can help in their implementation. If you think that also the last two are important in your project, vote for them, too. You can also suggest other formats, but in that case you must also suggest some free source code that explains how to load and render that format using OpenGL.
You can vote at will any number of formats, but choose only the ones you absolutely need, so I can focus my efforts (and my spare time) in a useful direction.

MS3D performances

A few weeks ago I made a comparison between the render speed of similar models in MS3D and MD3 format (read the post) and I realized that the engine can render a large number of MD3 models at the same frame rate of a small number of MS3D models.
One may ask if other 3D engines render MS3D models better. Read below to discover that… APOCALYX wins again!

Irrlicht above, APOCALYX below

In the screenshots above, you can see the same MS3D dwarf model rendered by Irrlicht (top) and APOCALYX (bottom). The Irrlicht’s picture is taken from the mesh viewer programmed in C++ of that engine, while the APOCALYX’ picture is rendered by the Lua demo “ModelMS3D” included in DemoPack2 (I simply removed the shadow and the terrain, because the Irrlicht viewer does not show any of the two, only the skybox).
In conclusion, which are the results? APOCALYX beats Irrlicht 330 fps against 320. Well, let’s say it’s a draw, but this comparison says that the MS3D viewer included in APOCALYX is as good as the one of Irrlicht.
We get another surpsising results: an engine developed by a single coder can compete against more advertised engines developed by a team of programmers. For other surprising results read the comparison between the BSP viewer of Irrlicht and APOCALYX and the BSP viewer of Ogre3D and APOCALYX.

MS3D vs MD3 performances

The comparison between different model formats supported by APOCALYX continues.
This time I compare the same dog model in its original MS3D format against its MD3 version. The MD3 format is the old vertex-based Quake3 format, while MS3D is the native format used by the MilkShape3D modeller. The latter uses skeletal animation.

MS3D above, MD3 below

In the screenshots above, you can see two scenes rendered at the same frame rate. It’s evident that the engine performs the MS3D rendering at poor speed, compared to MD3 rendering, in fact the first loses 25 dogs against 225!
The main reasons are two: MS3D, being skeleton-based, require more computations than MD3 to place each vertex; then MS3D does not support yet the clone function and every dog in the picture is a different model with its own animation data, while similar MD3 models share the same data, so the impact on memory allocation is reduced.
I think there is room for a lot of speed improvements in the MS3D animator, but in the meantime I suggest, if you own some MS3D model, to convert them to MD3 (if there are only a few animation sequences) or MDL, because they are currently faster.