Khronos Is Working On An OpenGL Transmission Format

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Khronos Is Working On An OpenGL Transmission Format

One of the new standards being brewed by The Khronos Group is an OpenGL Transmission Format, glTF...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Khronos-OpenGL-glTF

[Creak]

So... basically... it's an compression format for skeletal animations?

It's not really clear what glTF is...

[sloth77]

https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF/blob/master/specification/README.md

[GreatEmerald]

Using MP3 and H.264 as examples of what they're trying to achieve certainly doesn't sound very good...

[duby229]

Using MP3 and H.264 as examples of what they're trying to achieve certainly doesn't sound very good...

So I don't get it, is it like a container format, or is it like a self executable?

[sloth77]

As far as I can see its a way of "exporting" an OpenGL scene in a portable format. So it contains a scene graph as a JSON formatted text file and all the other assets (textures, shaders, etc) as binary files referenced by the JSON file

But then I only glanced at the GitHub readme...

[Creak]

By reading the GitHub readme, I see at least one problem with that: in games, we don't have one graphic asset for each object. We share assets across the objects. For instance, the same texture can be used on different geometries, or several animations can be used indifferently on several characters, etc... Here, it seems that you can indeed describe a whole scene into one file (i.e. 1 .FBX <=> 1 .gltf), that's cool I suppose, but that's not what the game industry needs.

[profoundWHALE]

[snip]
that's cool I suppose, but that's not what the game industry needs.

"It's the standard that the gaming industry deserves, but not the one it needs right now."
-Commissioner Gordon

[Meteorhead]

What I don't quite understand, is that if it's agnostic to the referencing runtime, then why is it called glTF? Or does that mean that it's agnostic to the OpenGL runtime vendor? That's pretty slim for something that wants to be graoundbreaking. I figure it's the prior, but then the naming is very unlucky.

Event without looking at the README, I am almost certain that beside the missing flexibility that Creak wrote, any compression format in the Vulkan/DX12/Metal era that is not at least decompressable on the GPU is most certainly not innovative.

Sidenote: I thought that the massive boom in IGP and GPU capabilities that started to take shape around 2013 would give birth to a myriad of GPU-parallel lossless entropy compression/hashing/encryption algorithms. Instead everyone is building fixed function hardware for algorithms that come and go like the seasons.

[CrystalGamma]

Sounds like a standardized APItrace clone if you ask me ... (The format, that is.)