summary of diffs between 1.3 and 1.4?

Is there, somewhere, a document that summarizes differences in the schema from 1.3 to 1.4, to assist with porting? Please do not say look at the current release notes…currently the available document linked from the Khronos website is for 1.4.1, and seems to only talk 1.4 -> 1.4.1., with no mention of 1.3!

I’m sure I could reverse engineer the diffs from the 1.3.1 and 1.4.1 specs, but I’d rather have a primer!

Thank you.

Graham Rhodes

I suppose the info I asked for might be useful to someone; however, having looked into things more thoroughly, it seems the right thing to do is to throw away the old 1.3 stuff and start anew with COLLADA_DOM. Thanks to all who read the thread!

It’s true that COLLADA 1.3 and 1.4 define separate XML namespaces such that they exist independently. In the past I have recommended that people with 1.3 implementations should keep them as-is since 1.4 has no impact on supporting 1.3 documents.

COLLADA 1.3 and 1.4 share many of the same elements and constructs, although there are significant changes and additions in 1.4. For example they share most of the geometry mesh representations but differ greatly on the lighting of that geometry because 1.4 has a comprehensive effects system.

The COLLADA 1.4 DOM includes classes generated from both the 1.4.1 and the 1.3.1 schema. You can build the DOM using either version of schema classes but you cannot combine them into a single build (because the DOM doesn’t support namespaces in it’s object model).

The FCollada library from Feeling Software is an example of building 1.4 support around an existing 1.3 implementation. It offers a higher level API to access documents. You might find that a useful tool.

anecdote: COLLADA 1.3 is the last specification completed by SCE et all prior to the adoption of COLLADA 1.4 by The Khronos Group consortium. Khronos is promoting open standards, including COLLADA and OpenGL among others, and since 1.3 predates the technology transfer, khonos.org hosts only information about COLLADA 1.4 and beyond.

Good historical information folks, thank you. We are producing 1.4x files out of our procedural geometry tool, so it makes sense for me to just use COLLADA_DOM and forget the old code that wasn’t even written with the DOM. I’m up and running now!