Collada: game on.(view point: Tech)(Editorial)

Whether the publishers admit it or not, the game industry is in crisis. The costs associated with creating games are rising, deadlines are slipping, and the reality is that consumers are not going to pay much more than $50 for a new game. At the heart of the crisis is the growing complexity of games, making them more complicated, and every bit as expensive to create as many major motion pictures.

Console manufacturers are at the mercy of the game development community. The success of a new console depends a great deal on the number of games available to support it at launch. If the game developers can't deliver a compelling slate of games to coincide with the delivery of a new console, such as the Sony PlayStation 3, for example, it could easily slow down consumer acceptance of the product.

Sony proposes a solution in Collada, or Collaborative Design Activity, an XML schema that offers an intermediate format for game developers to losslessly exchange asset data between authoring tools. A tool-neutral, open standard that recognizes the complexity of authored 3D data, Collada enables developers to mix and match tools from different vendors to create their own customized tool chains. The Collada XML schema enables a description of a database or directory so that data can be exchanged with all its components--including multiple versions of the same assets intended for different purposes or targets.

Perhaps a little history is in order. Back in 1999, and earlier, as Sony was preparing for the PlayStation 2, Sony's engineers knew that the platform would be challenging for developers. The company created a middleware program to encourage the development of tools to make content creation easier for those targeting the PlayStation 2. The program was a limited success. There are plenty of middleware tools available, but often game developers have to adapt the tools to their own uses and applications. Sony found that game developers themselves were too embattled to create their own tools. The idea of Collada is an expandable one that intends to build a framework for data creation and exchange that will provide a clear set of procedures as well as standards and formats for developers, allowing them to access, track, and exchange assets. Rather than encouraging companies to build tools, Collada functions as a pool that will grow in usefulness as companies contribute.

In the next step to making Collada more useful, Sony has made the format open to Khronos, an industry consortium founded in 2002 dedicated to creating tools and APIs that enable the authoring and playback of rich media on different platforms and devices.

Announced at SIGGRAPH 2005, Collada is a Khronos working group. As such, it is part of the open standards movement and is offered royalty free. Khronos has proven itself to be a practical resource for companies that need to reach common ground, in spite of the fact that they may be competitors or tangentially related. And, in the case of Collada, competitors Alias, Autodesk Media and Entertainment, and ...