Hi, I am new to the forums, and to Collada, I’ve been reading about it, and I am willing to support collada in my future projects
I have some experience parsing XML files, and other text file formats, and I realized how bad is to write/read floating point values from a text file.
To avoid the problem, I began to write my floating point values as hexadecimal values (actually, a float casted to a DWORD), and I was wondering, if it could be possible for collada to support this?
In practice, it would mean to add a new tag, that could be called ARRAY_HEXFLOAT or something like that, and the values would look like: 0 0 0 3f8000 3f4f344 , etc
The first advantage is that the original floating point value is stored unaltered, and without loosing precision, contrary to what happens when saving the value in decimal format. This would give the file format the same “precision quality” than a binary file format.
The second advantage is document size: based on my experience, saving an array of floats uses more characters than saving the same array using the same values, casted to DWORDs, and written in hexadecimal format.
There’s another advantage, and it is that hexadecimal values are much easier to read/parse than floating point values, because they only need a cast, in the past, I had lots of troubles reading floats from text files, specially from the old ASC file format…
Hope you can consider this suggestion, and I apologize if this has already been discussed
Vicente Penades