Cal3D models (II)

The visitors of the APOCALYX Blog have chosen again. This time the choice regards the improvements of the animated model formats supported by APOCALYX. The list in order of importance is the following: MD5 (13), Cal3D (10), X (4), MDL (3), MD3 (2), MD2 (1), MS3D(1), Other (0).

Cal3D models from the "Cally demo"

It seems that the APOCALYX users want to adopt in their games mainly MD5 or Cal3D models, then X and MDL follows. Probably MD3 or MD2 are too old to be still interesting, while MS3D models require a commercial tool (MilkShape3D), so it's not so useful for amateurs.
At the beginning of the poll, MD5 took immediately the head of the competition. Then someone have commented that Cal3D is a very nice model format, especially because it is supported by Blender, the well known free modeller. Immediately Cal3D regained a better position in the list. Finally, X and MDL come. The latter is another very old format, but compared to MD3 and MD2 is more advanced because it is based on skeletons, while the animations of MD3 and MD2 are vertex based.
Users, that regularly visit this blog, knows that I like very much MDL models. That is true only because there are a lot of MDL models available and I can find a lot of them good for my demos or games without searching too much. I'd prefer Cal3D, of course, because more advanced, but I can't easily find good models in this format. As I said in a past post, I have found only the three that you can see in the screeshot above. They are too few to put together interesting demos. However, if a modeller wants to donate some of his Cal3D models for my free demos, they are welcome!

Cal3D models

Because of a comment to yesterday's post, I surprisingly discover that at least one user wants improvements on the Cal3D format support (probably more than one, as I can see in the results of the last poll).
I say "surprisingly" because until now I was aware of very little interest on this kind of format, that on the contrary I judge very good. I usually evaluate the popularity of a format considering the number of free models available on the internet, in fact being not a modeller, I often use free models for my demos. Years ago, when I included the Cal3D library in the engine, I also expected to find a lot of free Cal3D models available, but I coudn't find any. I realized that format was not so popular.

In practice, the only interesting models that I could find in that format were those three available in the demos of the library (the paladin, the skeleton and a female figure): not enough to build beautiful demos.

Anyway, some time ago, a user wrote a useful tutorial on the creation of Cal3D models in Blender and explained how to load them in APOCALYX. That tutorial is available in the Users' Gallery. I thought that was enough to renew the interest on this format but nothing happened.
Of course, if someone is really interested in an improvement of the Cal3D format can give his vote in the poll, but I'm also curious to see some new Cal3D models before, because it's easy to ask for this and that, but if no one is going to use a feature, I'm simply going to lose my time... and I have no time to lose.

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.