RSSOpen 3D graphics standard backed by Sony, Intel, Nvidia gains kinematics
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published August 6, 2008, 5:00 PM
You might prefer for the game console of your choice to be distinct or superior in some well-defined way. But as a developer, you might prefer to develop toward a more open, portable standard, such as the one being advanced this week.
In advance of a major demonstration at a graphics industry convention in Los Angeles next week, the Khronos Group coalition of graphics developers announced they will be demonstrating an improved open standard for representing 3D graphics assets that adds the ability for objects to have movable skeletons with skin and other objects attached.
The concept is called kinematics, and it's nothing new to graphical computing. Essentially, it's the idea that an object may be comprised of moving parts that are virtually connected to one another, and moving with respect to one another. A much more realistic person or creature can be simulated using this methodology. But until recently, it hasn't been possible to create such moving, animated objects in a way that's portable between gaming consoles, PC platforms, and handhelds.
That changes today, with the advent of version 1.5 of the Collada standard. Collada is developed by the same Khronos Group that's now in charge of the OpenGL rendering framework. Its primary backer is Sony, although Nvidia vice president Neil Trevett also serves as Khronos' president. This week's developments, however, show evidence of greater contributions from Khronos members Intel, Adobe, and Google.
Years ago, 3D worlds were simulated using patterns of interlinked triangles and rectangles, presenting designers with the challenge of devising new virtual realms around surfaces rather than structures. Kinematics enables designers to work more like sculptors and animators, by presenting them with tools that help them define what things in a virtual world are made of, how they move, and where they're going with respect to their environment.
According to the version Collada v1.5 release notes (PDF available here), an XML-based framework is provided for representing kinematic scenes, made up of instantiations of mechanically represented objects. Imagine a "bird" as though it were a class, and then imagine a flock of such birds as members of this class, with different permutations -- what Collada calls an articulated system. Then picture a scene where the flock flies in formation. You now have a basic picture of a three-tier classification scheme, where the latter element is the scene.
Another addition to the 1.5 specification is a new way to represent boundaries for geometric objects, such as cones, cylinders, toruses (or rather, tori), and complex curved surfaces.
Again, it's not so much that these features weren't available to game developers before -- they actually have been, for some time. But developers who want to build for multiple platforms need a way to transport their game assets between platforms; and in a perfect world, it would be nicer if they could use a more platform-neutral development environment to begin with, and then build for specific platforms separately late in their projects.
This will be the goal of tools such as Google SketchUp, Nvidia FX Composer, Autodesk 3DS Max, AMD RenderMonkey, and Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended, which are among the Khronos members' products that the group said today will be expanded to support Collada version 1.5.
So what are Microsoft and AMD doing? I can only imagine they'll try to compete with this if not jump aboard, and of course in the end the loser will be the consumer, again. My "standard" can pee farther than yours!
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|At least AMD has shown very little interest in 3D graphics in form of (proper) tools and so on. In the other hand NVIDIA has put down quite a bit of effort with FX Composer 2 and Cg which both are quite amazing.
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|Microsoft has this 3D API that it uses, you may have heart of it, it's called Direct3D and it's part of DirectX (where do you think the Xbox got it's name... it was the DirectX box -> DirectXbox -> Xbox). That's what they use on their console and they have this XNA thing as an easier to use higher level abstraction for it.
Collada is backed by Sony because they have no such thing. nVidia makes the GPU in Sony's console. ATI is in the Xbox360 so they have no need for this. Intel has a general interest in 3D (for their hardware) and doesn't want to be tied to MS. Adobe, Autodesk, and Google have 3D software apps and likewise don't want to be tied only to the MS platform.
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|Sony, and Nintendo for that matter, use OpenGL. The odd ball out is Microsoft who went their own way with Direct3D.
Back in the day, all games were OpenGL. This posed a problem for Microsoft in that you could easily port to other platforms.
Microsoft knew controlling the APIs locks apps into their platform. So they buddied up with SGI to make Farenheit and quickly stabbed SGI in the back and went their own way with Direct3D. In the process they poisoned OpenGL and stalled it long enough so that Direct3D could get released.
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|We all know OPenGL is utter *crap* compared to DirectX. It's slow, painful, a PITA to code for, and lacks a huge amount of functionality.
Of course, you know that, you just want to piss on MSFT some more.
Hey, no problem. But next time, choose one of the *many* valid reasons for doing so...
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|"Back in the day, all games were OpenGL."
In a way, but not OpenGL exactly. You may have heard of this obscure little API called Glide from 3dfx, and a few other less popular ones such as S3 Metal and PowerVR SGL. Of course I'm kidding about the obscure part, in the early days of hardware 3D Glide was king. To be fair it was based on OpenGL, but was still a separate proprietary API.
Even ATI had it's own API once called CIF, but very few games ever supported it.
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|"We all know OPenGL is utter *crap* compared to DirectX. It's slow, painful, a PITA to code for, and lacks a huge amount of functionality."
Who pooped on your pancakes? How is it crap? How is it slow? How is it a PITA to code for? What functionality is it missing?
How is speaking the truth pissing on Microsoft? Man, the trolls here never cease to amaze me. Not sure why i even replied, not like i will get a coherent response...
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|Glide only ran on 3dfx cards. Open GL ran on most all of them. GLQuake, for example. Hint...the GL did not stand for Glide.
Everyone scrambled to get away from the proprietary API's like Glide and onto a standard like OpenGL.
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|Yes I know, it was proprietary. It was also by far the most popular API at the time, OpenGL and others were barely on the radar at the time. Yes people moved away from it eventually, but that wasn't until years later and it wasn't only because it was proprietary because 3dfx later made it open source. It was really because of the way the company was run. Overdue releases, poor performance and lots of bad decisions. Nvidia had taken the performance crown from them and were a better value.
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