The weekly summaries were harder to maintain than exptected, but there wasn’t really that much of excitement during the first week to justify a post.

This week I’ve worked on finishing the COLLADA parser, which I am pretty much done with. There are some tags that aren’t parsed correctly (i.e., not at all), but otherwise it is pretty complete. With some quick and dirty hacks I was able to take out the information needed to display a mesh (which contained submeshes) onto the screen. This was really exciting, and really made all the effort worth it.

The first mesh outputted by the parser

I must say that I am really starting to like COLLADA, as it is so dynamically specified. One is never really constrained to do things in a certain way, but can rather choose after ones’ own liking (in limited ways, of course).

This dynamic way of doing things is however the disadvantage as well, as it isn’t trivial how to extract a certain set of data. It gets worse as one have to almost always have to parse the whole document in order to be certain that all of the data required has been fetched.

(Seeing as this post has been a draft almost 9 days, I figured I’ll just post it in its current state, and continue in a future post)