Is COLLADA a dead format?

I've been reading lots of musings on the net that COLLADA is a dead file format? In that applications are not updating their support for it et开发者_JAVA百科c. Is this true? It was originally designed to be a format that could be almost application independant so my question is in 2 parts. Is it a dead format? And if so, what is the current accepted format to maximise inter-application development (and to use with OpenGL applications)?

Most applications are supporting COLLADA, new support is announced all the time. Follow COLLADA on twitter to get daily updates... far to be dead. Hard to keep track in fact.

BTW, Khronos just released the COLLADA reference card. free at http://www.khronos.org/files/collada_reference_card_1_4.pdf , making it easier to implement.

Still the missing piece was the conformance test, to make sure applications are correctly following the specification, and it has been released recently

In short, expect improved support, more applications, better interoperability. One thing for sure is COLLADA is a published standard, (as opposed to be a proprietary technology), so it is there to stay and safe to invest in as it is not impacted by mergers, bankruptcies, change in company policies...

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also, we are in the process of rebuilding collada.org. There is an incomplete list of products , and a forum for your questions.

COLLADA was supposed to be an intermediate format while producing content. That is why there are more plugins and libraries for modeling packages than there are for 3d engines and libraries.

A custom OpenGL graphics engine will tend to use its own model format so it can implement new features that are not in COLLADA.

There's a lot of middle-ware support for COLLADA, so I don't think you can call it dead. However, it hasn't become The One Format To Rule Them All, as some was hoping for. Basically, it's the best common middle-ground for 3d-asset exchange between different software-packages, but it's not a very good fit for in-engine usage.

I am not really optimistic about the future of the COLLADA format. Nothing happened since the publication of specification 1.5. There is no tool which supports the complete COLLADA functionality.

OpenCOLLADA is a nice library which helps the format alive for now, but it is not enough. Format itself should improve through the time, too. I have tried to work with physics libraries of COLLADA, the only tool I can find to create a reasonable example was Maya. And not without extra effort to install plugins, etc. Most of the importers for COLLADA does not support 1.5, and when they support the version they do not support some of the elements. COLLADA model repository server is down for ages, it is difficult to find good examples with variety to work with.

AutomationML format uses COLLADA as graphic format, which brings the possibility to be spread for industrial usage. But there are already some strong competitors in this field like JT.

An extra problem, COLLADA supports MathML in element but during MathML improves as a format, COLLADA stays put and new versions of MathML format cannot be used.

I liked the idea of the COLLADA, but it is far away from its goals because of the lack of support and applications.