Load COLLADA - geometry, animation, textures - what applies?

I've been recommended to load 3D animations in the COLLADA format - I consulted the quick reference and docs for a while but I am pretty lost. What parts of the format do I actually care about if I want to:

• Load all vertices
• Load up 开发者_如何学JAVAall triangles or trianglestrips in the objects (relationships between verts)
• load animation info of where verts move to over time
• Textures and texcoord info

Also is there a file format I can convert COLLADA to that will more concisely and conveniently describe just that data? Or is it easier to pull from COLLADA format than I may think...

I'm pretty much doing the same thing at the moment. The most useful info I found describing whats going on in the COLLADA doc is here http://www.wazim.com/Collada_Tutorial_1.htm

For the mesh your mainly interested in the 'float_array' tags and if triangulated the 'p' tags unfortunately I only just started on the animation part myself so not much I can say there. But if you look into the file you'll see the layout is obvious in some parts i.e. 'library_animations' is where all the animation data is stored, 'library_geometries' for the mesh etc..

What language is your game engine in? You could look at the easy-to-understand jMonkeyEngine or Ardor3D sources, both of which support COLLADA loading. You can trace the geometry creation directly.