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?
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.