Collada and Project Verse status?

Hi All,

This is my first post here so first: Hello Guys!

I’m very interested in Collada and Project Verse could anyone tell me about the status of this collaboration?

As I read in previous posts there should be a forum for it, but it isn’t there:
https://collada.org/public_forum/viewforum.php?f=25

Thanks in advance,
-P

The main developer on the Collada side was Andy Lorino. He left SCEA almost a year ago, and the collaboration basically died after that unfortunately.

Steve

Hi Steve,

Thanks for the quick reply. Unfortunately this is sad news.

As far as I know there was some technology demonstration at GDC2007 where a realtime engine running on a PS3 showed (.dae) model changes made in Blender in real-time.

If I understand correctly to achieve that you had to extend Collada DOM to be able to handle data updates and implemented a Verse i/o plugin, right?

Would it be possible to get some more technical information how was it implemented?

Thanks,
-P

Basically, we interfaced the DOM to verse API/Server calls so dynamic changes of the DOM internal representation would be available to the application as events.
We used the standard Blender and 3dsMax verse plug-ins, and a modified COLLADA viewer for this to work. In addition, we could start the ‘sanbox’ buy loading a COLLADA file into the Verse server as a separate utility application.

We were successful to do a demonstration at GDC last year, but convinced ourselves that a lot needed to be done to use this system in production

  • There is a need for asset management (lock, check-in, check-out). Some research was done there, but basically the system works well for sandbox collaborative development, but becomes impractical and ‘messy’ without proper asset management.
  • There are many aspects of COLLADA that could not be represented in Verse, and most of the work was to figure out how to fit COLLADA into Verse description. I wont go in details here, but Verse representation is too specific to a particular implementation (multi-res meshs, shader graph), and does not offer the same flexibility that COLLADA users expect (game data, extra, Shader FX …)

Nonetheless, there was a lot of good things about this prototype demonstration, and I hope that there will be enough interest/resources to be able to take this further.

Regards
– Remi

The best person to talk to about this right now is probably Eskil Steenberg who is the main promoter/developer of Verse…

You can probably contact him via one of the Verse websites.

Thanks guys, I’ll contact Eskil.

-P