U3D vs. X3D

I was looking at the website of the purveyor of the X3D format yesterday, and I noticed that they had a newspost slamming the rival 3D format U3D there. I haven't read the U3D spec yet, but based on the newspost, it sounds pretty good. In fact, I think that if the U3D spec had been available when I started my X3D project, I would have used U3D instead.

The newspost complains about how X3D only supports triangle meshes and the like. Honestly though, having just finished implementing a horrible n^4 concave polygon triangulation algorithm for my X3D viewer, I'm liking the idea of a format only supporting triangle meshes more and more.

I've only implemented a small amount of the X3D spec, and I can't help but feel that it lacks a certain elegance and simplicity in its design. I think many of the problems evolved out of the fact that the designers wanted people to be able to code X3D by hand. As such, the spec supports lots of shortcuts and features to aid people coding up X3D manually such as the ability to leave out certain tags or to let the browser automatically calculate normals etc. These sorts of things simply make the implementation more complicated and results in lots of "special cases" in the specification. In reality, no one designs a 3d model using text (believe me, I tried this once. It's totally hopeless), so it would have been better to leave out stuff like that.

I'm not implementing the X3D event model, so I'm not too familiar with it, but my gut feeling is that it is likely too expressive. The Postscript language has a similar problem in that it is a full programming language, meaning that extracting meaning from the language is extremely difficult without actually executing it. For example, let's say I wanted to export an animation to another program. The exported animation will have a clock object whose timing is fed into some sort of coordinate generator whose events would be fed into the actual object being animated or something like that. Would an X3D importer be able to interpret the combination of event objects and event routing as being an animation and to import it as such? Or would it simply have to import these event nodes as is and leave it to the user to figure out that it represents an animation? Just as human language is too expressive for computers to understand, which is why we have programming languages, the X3D model might be too expressive for an import tool to recognize the patterns, which is why more restrictive languages are often more useful. If a language is too expressive for an import tool to understand its meaning, resulting in it being imported as a black box, then the language might as well be some standard language like ECMAScript that people are already familiar with.

And of course, there's my bias against "platforms." I feel that the best specifications are for little self-contained toolkits that can be bolted on to existing applications. X3D was designed as a complete platform for 3D browsing, so it has a tendency to want to take over your application as opposed to being a simple bolt-in. For example, to implement a module for importing animation, you need to add the event model to your application, some sort of reflection mechanism for X3D objects to parse the event code, the actual X3D objects themselves, etc. etc. Afterwards, it's no longer a simple little import tool; you've essentially just written an X3D browser. At that point, you might as well just write your whole application to be X3D-based.

X3D simply tries to do too much and as a result is too complex. U3D focuses on one small aspect of 3D file exchange and hopefully ends up being small, graceful, and easy to use. It's somewhat like the TIFF file format which is so complicated and supports so many features that no one really uses it for anything. It's a coin toss as to whether an arbitrary TIFF file might be importable by a TIFF import tool or not: there might be multiple pages in there, encoded in some weird colour space, compressed using some unknown scheme, etc. With PNG, you're pretty much guaranteed success.