   static mesh animation - your thoughts on file data...
  hey all,i've completed all of the main section of my new engine and have decided i might as well try and add controlling of animation for meshes. however, while looking for methods of how to animate models and store the data i've decided i don't really want to use microsoft's built in animation controls (for directx meshes).this made me think i would like to come up with my own way of handling animations:i would like to have a base mesh in a file (so all vertex and texture data) and all animation data for that mesh in another file. this method is already how i handle 2d image animation (although that is obviously much easier and requires much less file size). also, a note: i mentioned "static" in the subject because i don't want to mess around with skeletal animation at the moment - just static, predefined animation that just reads from a file and modifies the vertices of a mesh directly.so my questions/topic of discussion is this:if you were creating a file dedicated to animation data:-what would you put in it?-how would you represent this data?-would you use binary files or text files? why?i already have many ideas of my own in regards to these questions, and that is why i'm asking for a bit of a discussion - i am hoping it might help me make a more informed decision about how i should go about writing and storing an animation file.to get the discussion going, here's my answers (at the moment) to these questions:1. NAME - the name of the animation that is next to load   FPS - the frames per second that the animation should run at   FRAME DATA - the actual data of each frame of animation2. NAME - string   FPS - integer   FRAME DATA - FRAME NUMBER - integer    - DATA - an array of vectors (3) representing the position values   of all vertices in regards to this frame of the animation3. Undecided - text files are likely to be much too large but are easier (for me at least) to read/write and navigate through (i haven't done much binary file work...). binary files though will be much smaller and can then contain much higher levels of animation and more animations without using huge file sizes (but like i said, i've not done much/anything with binary files so, should i do some research to use them?).please correct me on anything that is wrong here - its all part of learning!thanks in advance for any discussion and help with this topic.   