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!

MD5 models

It seems that the preferred model format chosen by the visitors in the current poll is the MD5 taken from Doom3. Effectively it's going to be the most advanced model format supported by APOCALYX, in fact also GLSL shaders are applied to this kind of models. Until now, only Cal3D already supported vertex and pixel shaders, but no one seems to use it, so MD5 is welcome. I'm going to implement it, if the poll will confirm the current results.

Well known characters from Doom3

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.