   retail game model formats
  what file format do retail games use because they look really good and also animated , you dont seem to see anything on the web about this to add to your own engine etc..   
  I reckon that many (if not most) game engines will use a custom, optimized-for-loading format that is exported by the engines' content creation toolchain (eg. Unreal Engine, Gamebryo or w/w) .This toolchain will normally be able to import multiple source formats (model/scene/animation formats of Max, Maya etc).   ;  FYI konfusius is correct.However i've never needed anything more than .x for hobbyist projects. I have also seen .x and .fbx used in the industry.   ;  yes ive messed with .x format but i am sure retail games dont use it.   ;  Most don't, but why does that matter? If it suits your needs then use it. Generally speaking, if you did what they do in the games industry you wouldn't get anything done! :D   ;Quote:Original post by Anddoswhat file format do retail games use because they look really good and also animated , you dont seem to see anything on the web about this to add to your own engine etc..The quality of the work does not come from the format they use.  There is no magic format that makes it look good.For example, quality art looks good in any format: You don't care if the image is bmp, or jpg, or png, or tga.Retail games spend a long time on their assets.  There is time in concept art, design, modeling, skinning, shading, rigging, animating, and scripting.  At every step the pieces are reviewed and adjusted.  Then they are looked at for thousands of hours (in total) by a small army of QA and testers.Boring objects in the game (such as distant scenery) might only have 10-20 total work hours committed to them.  Most of the things you interact with will have a few hundred hours, including their time in concept art and QA.  Important objects might get a full year of attention between concept and ship.Critical pieces, such as the main characters in an RPG, can have several work-years devoted to just making a single character look good.  There are similar amounts of time spent on developing the engine.  Scripting support, model loading and processing, rendering techniques, shader processing, and so on.  These take effort from the engineering team.The format the use just happens to be something that encodes their work, and it comes from their engine.  If that happens to be .x file for you, then so be it.It is this iteration time and the attention to detail that make retail products look good, not the file format.   ;Quote:Original post by Anddosbecause they look really good and also animatedA lot of that is good artwork rather than the file format; it doesn't matter how the data is stored as long as it is appropriate for the system in question.For example, say you have a really nice detailed model of a car, with beautiful textures?  What format should you store it in?  You shouldn't store it in a format where compression removes the detail of the textures and makes it ugly.  You shouldn't store it in a format where it will take up so much memory that none is left for the rest of the game, or a format that takes an excessively long time to load.  You could however store it in any format you don't have a good reason not to use.If .x is capable of storing your assets and you're able to display and manipulate them with no excessive difficulties then it is a good choice for your project - and there are probably plenty of equally good choices as well.   ;  Frob speaks truth. Also, as the others have said, you will find that more times than not "the pros" use custom formats, suited to their engine. Internally, they may save their art in various formats just so that it's easier for the artists to manipulate, but in the end, what goes into the game is generally pretty specific to the engine in which it is intended to be displayed.   ;Quote:Original post by dudeman21Frob speaks truth. Also, as the others have said, you will find that more times than not "the pros" use custom formats, suited to their engine. Internally, they may save their art in various formats just so that it's easier for the artists to manipulate, but in the end, what goes into the game is generally pretty specific to the engine in which it is intended to be displayed.I actually just got my copy of "Game Engine Gems" and the 2nd gem, "The Game Asset Pipeline" explains how assets are stored through various stages in the pipeline.  Very informative.  The same model will be stored in 2-3 different formats depending on what stage of completion the model is at.   