Haven’t posted in a while. Well, really, no one reads my little blog so no one has missed my missives.
To catch up:
After doing some work on region simplification (for displaying OpenSimulator regions in a browser), I’ve been trying to create an OAR to other format converter. OAR files are the region archive format of OpenSimulator. The OAR file reading code is in C# (the native language of OpenSimulator ). I started thinking that the best output format would be GLTF since it was new and upcoming. There are conversion toolsets in the Cesium project and it looked like the browser world was moving there.
Well, I ended up writing my own GLTF format exporter and had it more-or-less working with ThreeJS.
Then, the GLTF standards group decided that the world needed a version 2 of the GLTF format. Over many months (and I mean MANY), the standard and then all of the tools in the pipeline converted from GLTFv1 to GLTFv2. Then there was the wait for the GLTF extensions to convert to version 2. As of this writing, I’m not sure all the tools have caught up.
It then occured to me that I could use an existing format conversion library to convert the OAR scene to many different formats. So I found Assimp that reads and writes many different 3D formats. One problem with that choice is that Assimp is a C++ library and, as mentioned above, I was working in C#.
An interface library was required so I found Assimp-net. Well, actually one of the forks of Assimp-net which had been updated recently. But it had been updated to the most recent Microsoft C# framework which, it turned out, was not yet supported by everything.
Sigh. It is frustrating spending time playing with tool versioning when I just wanted to do some 3D object conversion. It feels like I started the day trying to build a house. But, to build that house, I needed a hammer. So I needed to research what hammer options were available. To get the hammer option I needed, I had to then study forging and how to forge the type of hammer I needed. Finally, after weeks of researching hammers and forging and where to dig up the iron oar, I look up and there is still the empty lot where my house should be.
I’m shelving that project to let the tools mature a bit. In the mean time, it’s off to building robots!