if you could pick a standard format for a purpose what would it be and why?
e.g. flac for lossless audio because…
(yes you can add new categories)
summary:
- photos .jxl
- open domain image data .exr
- videos .av1
- lossless audio .flac
- lossy audio .opus
- subtitles srt/ass
- fonts .otf
- container mkv (doesnt contain .jxl)
- plain text utf-8 (many also say markup but disagree on the implementation)
- documents .odt
- archive files (this one is causing a bloodbath so i picked randomly) .tar.zst
- configuration files toml
- typesetting typst
- interchange format .ora
- models .gltf / .glb
- daw session files .dawproject
- otdr measurement results .xml
USD is basically this, and is supported everywhere, give it a look!
USD is more for scenes than models. It’s meant primarily for stuff like 3dsmax and blender, and is far more complex than gltf.
It’s also not really supported everywhere. Pretty much every game engine lacks support for USD, while most (except unity for some reason) have at least some gltf support.
USD is also, at least as far as I’m concerned, dead in the water. I have never encountered a single USD file in the wild, though that might just be because I mainly only work in blender and godot.
I’m not against USD, and I’d love to see it get some more love, but it serves a different purpose than gltf.
So, you were refuting the “supported everywhere” bit. I’m not going to argue with that.
But I will point out that there is a difference between a format that is good for interchange and a format that is good for a game to internally use for rapid loading. I mean, games store things in a lot of ways that you wouldn’t want to use for interchange. Games will have textures compressed in texture formats that can be sent straight to the video card, but are relatively space-inefficient; you’d want to use PNG or JPEG or something like that for interchange. You’ll often use ZIP to bundle multiple files together; it’s not necessarily because it’s an ideal archive format, but because it provides indexed access to individual archive elements. Many games use WAV or other uncompressed audio formats that are cheap to load but not terribly space-efficient.
Right, haha, I forgot about those! Sorry, I was only really thinking of different modeling software.