Collada to be removed from after Blender 4.2 LTS

https://devtalk.blender.org/t/moving-collada-i-o-to-legacy-status/34621/23

Better keep that 4.2 LTS around.

 

I always wondered by BeamNG's models were in Collada and not something more common like FBX. Will this affect the devs?

 

I'm glad that Blender doesn't nag you to update. I remember using 3.2 way past 4.0 release and only realizing it dropped after seeing a YouTube recommendation. It's not like those CVEs are putting you at risk if you're just a regular user and work with trusted files. Well, there still technically is, but I doubt that an importer plugin will pull off a Spectre on your computer just because a few libs used for building it have some issues. Don't panic!

It would mean a lot of work. Not so much about the core code itself, this would probably be pretty easy, especially since FBX (proprietary Autodesk format, btw) is pretty similar in the way it works. What would be more difficult is managing this transition – they'd have to keep legacy .dae support if they don't want to re-export all content and, more importantly, disable access to old mods. People would simply not update their games just because of that, and if they still had to maintain this legacy .dae format, why even bother with a new one?

Also, don't the devs use 3DS Max for the most part anyway?

 

I believe that due to using Torque 3D engine has a base before they made changes to what they use now has a engine for the game, gltf/glb will most likely be a good candidate.

From what I've seen, they use Blender for their vehicles, haven't seen a screenshot of 3ds max for what I remember.

 

i believe .gltf/.glb is the successor to .dae, sorta how .usd is the successor to .fbx

 

GLFT works for me. When exporting car from game as GLTF, they actually have the textures on them in Blender.

 

that exporter isn't useful for modding or development, since it doesn't import the model in a consistent fashion (and you can't export models back to the game)

 

Apologies for necroing this thread, but I had to chime in here.

I just saw the Blender announcement. I don't think most people saw this coming, regardless of how dead OpenCollada has been for the past couple of years. From what I understand (correct me if I am wrong), if this goes through for the LTS 4.5 release of Blender, it will have significant ramifications for how content is packaged in BeamNG. If the devs decide to move over to another format, they will have to include legacy .dae support, but until when? And when they inevitably decide to drop it, almost all old mods will stop working, and the devs will have to repackage all of the previously existing vanilla content to another format (possibly GLTF/FBX). That seems like a lot of work.

 

I imagine that like most things, they devs will leave DAE backwards compatibility support in for a looong time.
the materials.cs format was deprecated in favour of materials.json close to 5 years ago, and the support for it is all still there with no sign of leaving.