FAQ

What …

What are the units, coordinate system ?

  • Coordinate system : Right Handled
    • object : Y up, Z forward, X left
    • camera : Y up, Z lookAt direction, X left
    • orthogonal-axes
    • uniform axis unit
    • front face: CCW (counter-clock-wise), back face: CW
  • Distance unit : meter (float)
  • Time unit : millisecond (int32)
  • Angle unit : radian (float)

I try to collect same data for game engine, tools, to help create importer/exporter. Help me to complete the table

What is the file extension ?

.xbuf

What is the future of the format ?

I don’t know ;-)

But there some ideas :

  • Integrate some community’ suggestions
  • Ingrate compression like glTF: Open 3D Graphics Compression
  • Define an archive format to store complementary data : textures, shaders, …

How …

How can I protect my content ?

  1. Change the file extension
  2. Modify the file content, example of modifications (can be combined) :
    • wrap into your own proto Message
    • add an header at the begin of the file (a fixed or variable size of useless bytes, some license info)
    • encrypt : rot13, pgp, …
    • wrap into an archive (but without the reguler extension): tar, zip,…
    • compress (but without the reguler extension) : snappy, gzip, bzip, lzma,…

Why …

Why not OpenGEX ?

  • Rxcept if you use OpenGEX Import Template (C++ only), it requires to write parser and low level writer, and writing good parser is hard.
  • Text based, not optimal for network and realtime update
  • Importer should support several metrics, several orientations (Z up, Y up,…)

Why not glTF ?

  • Moving and heavy spec ;-)
  • Json based format requires to write “semantic” parser, converter.

Why no configurable metrics (like in OpenGEX) ?

  • To simplify the loader (less composition to implement loader, less confusion) : “convention over configuration”
  • To ease share and merge of data (eg: merge multiples xbuf file)
  • It’s the responsability of the exporter to write shareable data (from internal format to xbuf)

Why no configurable up ?

  • See Why no configurable metrics (like in OpenGEX) ? (above).
  • To avoid branch in loader code like in this response on unity forum.

see discussion glTF : unify scenes axis-up.

Why no transform matrix, variant of Rotation, Scale ?

  • See Why no configurable metrics (like in OpenGEX) ? (above).
  • I don’t want too freedom (simple loader, more work on exporter), so I have to choose between matrix or translation / rotation / scale
  • Extracting translation / rotation / scale from a 4×4 matrix is harder than creating a 4×4 matrix from translation / rotation / scale.
  • Quaternion is often more animation friendly.