I don't much like the 'crapsoftware' tag. Inkscape has a few rough edges but it's been a life saver many a time. Well, not literally a life saver but I have used it to do many bits of vector art and it's a lot more portable and less fuss than Adobe's software (i.e. if I'm in a fix and not at my machine yet need to do some desktop publishing, I can install it in 5 minutes and it does the job). It's also more pleasant to use than GIMP or Blender, although they're also great when I can get hold of my preferred software for those tasks. So, massive thanks and kudos to the guy(s) behind it!
"Tell me, Dr. Freeman, if you can. You have destroyed so much. What is it, exactly, that you have created? Can you name even one thing? I thought not."
But of course, mac users won't know this as they won't have been able to get that far in the game yet.
Hang on.. 256 colours? That can't be 256 at once, surely. The Atari ST could only do 4bits per pixel out of a palette of 512. I'm guessing that's a palette of 256 so did it have an 8bit RAMDAC? (if I'm remembering my terms correctly).
To be fair, at my company, most of us do actually work sensible hours until crunch time when all bets are off. Our last crunch hurt a bit but didn't last as long as in many game companies I've heard of. Most of our relationships are still in tact and more daughter still recognises me!
As for the game designer job - it's a tough one. It's one of those jobs that I think many people think they can do and unfortunately, one that many who are put off by the more technical or artistic roles (as they sound like too much hard work) are attracted to. If you fall into that category, forget it - precisely because the remit of the job is vaguer than coding or any of the artistic disciplines, you have to show some demonstrable skill, which is hard because it's the job is less well defined.
The best game designers are not only great at designing fun games, they have a good understanding and respect of the technical side too and appreciate how much work a given feature is. There's also a lot of detailed design doc writing involved and more meetings than you can shake a stick at. For some games, in depth knowledge of a particular esoteric subject relevant to game you're working on would also be useful.
Japan still registers bikes - When I lived there, my g/f bought me one for my birthday and registered it. The police often stopped cyclists to check their registration details and as foreigner, I stood out and was checked regularly (I eventually learned where their routes were and could get to work more quickly by avoiding them). It was sometimes difficult to explain why my bike was registered under the name of a Japanese girl so I usually launched into the explanation before they checked the bike's code.
Sigh, I hate this stupid meme. at least in the U.K., we pay vehicle excise duty which no more pays for the roads than the V.A.T. on a chocolate bar. The local council are responsible for their own roads so upkeep of those comes from their coffers. I pay 33% of my earnings as income tax and on top of that I have to pay council tax. The comparatively paltry amount that we have to pay for the privilege of owning a car would not pay for the upkeep of the nations roads and motorways. On top of this, I voluntarily pay more money to Sustrans, a charity that builds cycle paths than it costs to keep the family car on the road - we only use it maybe twice a month, yet still have to pay tax.
In short, I suspect I pay a whole lot more than you do towards the upkeep of the roads and yet I find it difficult to cycle to work without putting myself in danger, caused by the noticeable minority of dangerous drivers. They're probably muttering these same ignorant missives as they force me off the road for the umpteenth time.
And as for the registration process - ha! Cars have these checks because they are an order of magnitude more complex and dangerous than bikes! If you've got a flat or bald tire on your bike, you're going to notice it pretty quickly and then will have to push your bike home as the air escapes. Riding in such a condition is more likely to hurt yourself than anybody else. To reiterate the statistics I mentioned in a previous post - 3000 deaths caused by drivers annually in the U.K. Compare that with 1 death every two years caused by a cyclist: it's a 1:6000 ratio!
This is a general reply to the blase attitude towards the very life of others that some drivers here are espousing. So If you are a reasonably considerate driver, don't take it personally.
What is more important: that you get to where you're going fractionally faster or that you have respect for the safety of other people. In my country, over 3000 people die annually due to collisions with cars and most of those people are pedestrians or cyclists. Hundreds of thousands are injured. 2008 year was a good year and 'only' 2,943 were killed (this isn't a global figure, just in the UK). That's 2,943 families now missing loved ones. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/jun/27/transport1). That's a quarter of a million people since records began, in the UK alone (extrapolate for the world's population, that'd be closer to 25 million people killed on the worlds roads in the past 84 years).
Most drivers I encounter are polite and considerate and I'm polite and considerate right back to them - if I'm holding up a bunch of cars, I'll pull over to let them past if it's safe to do so as I want them driving up my arse about as much as they want to be held up by me.
However, most days I'll encounter some retard who thinks that driving like a lunatic is their god given right - these are the people who kill people like me and they should not be allowed on the roads.
If getting from A to B as fast as possible is, in fact, more important to you than somebody else's continued existence, let me put it to you in other terms: your journey is going to take a lot longer if you have to deal with the aftermath of killing a cyclist or pedestrian because you were driving too damn fast.
Wouldn't you get in to trouble if you kept communist's kids under your bed? On a related note, thank goodness Ronald Raygun, that clown off of that advert for fat clinics and possibly even some sort of distorted republican Jesus with guns saved us all from the evils of sharing.
Now we all work 16 hours a day to make rich people even richer (hell, it gets me out of bed in the morning. Gawd bless all those upper management and banking types, they need it more than we do) and the world is just peachy!
Couldn't agree more to all of these, particularly the tool chain point.. but then again, I'm programming game tools right now (as in, right now, this minute, for a project that needed them at the beginning) so I may be biased.
The small army you mentioned also creates problems of its own, particularly in terms of cost and communication.
Quality is also a huge issue, particularly for PC games. The absolute maze of hardware out there is one significant factor is ramping up the costs associated with PC game development, particularly if your aiming to develop a games that shows off modern hardware and yet still work on older machines so you can still sell the thing to enough people.
Based on my own experience, I think you're absolutely right in assuming that many games companies haven't taken tools and pipeline issues seriously in the past. In my mind, getting these right is the only way to make a top notch game within a reasonable budget.
Explaining this to the powers that be is not always the easiest task for us developers.
If you haven't found it already, search for 'unity build'. It's just a technique for collating cpp files into a single file but it's slashed my build times - not to the point where where I was 15 years ago with borland pascal but still, much much quicker and a hell of a lot cheaper than incredibuild (although combined with it, even better)
Just as your ancestors all learnt to speak Cherokee, Lakota and so on. I'd say that English has as much right as Spanish to be signposted in the U.S.A. The world would be a dull place with English as the only language.
Whilst the simpler machines of yesteryear were easier to master, I don't think that it's the lack of resources that are holding kids back.
I had the good fortune to grow up with like minded friends and we basically taught each other to code, write 3d engines and push the hardware. Also, we all went to a decent college and went the Basic->Pascal->C/C++ route.
Most of my old school friends work at IBM now but I'm a coder in the games industry thanks to their help and encouragment (and that of the few good teachers I've encountered). The biggest assets we had were curiosity and the need to learn and improve.
Any kid today with access to a PC and with the same will to learn can get the similar start that my friends and I enjoyed- you can get a whole slew of development tools for free. I use Visual Studio express at home and if you don't like that there's always GCC, Eclipse and plenty others.
We weren't encouraged to program by anybody but ourselves and didn't have the internet, which would have made life a lot easier.
I think it's just a case of numbers. We were absolutely in the minority of kids in 1990 and the population of Britain hasn't grown that much since then. Most kids our age back then, as now, were too busy getting pissed, stoned and pregnant to bother learning how to be good at anything, yet alone something as uncool as programming.
The simple fact is that the industry has grown and demands more staff than the minority pool of self motivated kids can provide. Also, it doesn't pay us half what we're worth so graduates smart enough to do this work probably leave the country (I know I did but then I came back when the Japanese govornment decided my visa was out of date:) or work on something less exciting that pays better whilst staring at the window thinking of game designs.
Ah, those were the days. I used self modifying assembly to get around the problem of combinatorial explosion when writing graphics drivers; i.e. where you have lots of states that all require an optimized inner loop with slightly different operators. Sort of the equivalent of pixel shaders, only self modifying.
That, and a lot of other tricks of mine became redundant when the pentium and predictive branching took off and as such, the amount of assembly in my code has dropped to practically nil, save for a few things that can only be done quickly with the odd specialized instruction call.
I'm a senior graphics coder for a games company in the UK but.. hang on a minute, I can read and do a variety of convincing impressions! That'd be a lot easier than all that 'chimp work' with all the maths and the C++, code design, gruelling deadlines and no royalties.
Seriously, if I could earn that much money for that amount of work then maybe my mortgage wouldn't look quite so intimidating.
Everybody deserves to be paid well for the work they put in as a function of the amount of money that their product makes. Just because your stupid voice or face is all over a product, doesn't mean that you're the most deserving of reward.
As I brush my teeth, going forward.. god it infuriates. I make a point of, wherever appropriate, stopping this hesitation filler from gaining any more traction than it already has. I know that the geek speak of we in the trenches can annoy the uninitiated but at least our acronyms mean something. This kind of managerial fluff is both grating and totally devoid of meaning, other than the images of short term thinking it evokes for me.
I don't think you're entirely correct - ray tracing, or tracing rays and bouncing them around a scene to see what they hit is used in most rendering algorithms somewhere or other. Hell, even rasterization uses a kind of ray tracing in environment mapping: you cast a ray from the eye to the pixel being rasterized and then reflect that in to look up into a precomputed environment map. And of course, we trace rays all the time for collision detection and various other tasks.
However, straight ray tracing will give you sharp shadows and won't simulate diffuse interactions correctly unless you start casting many bundles of rays around; and that starts to get very slow very quickly. Yes, photon mapping has the use of rays and intersection tests in common with vanilla ray tracing but it goes a lot further in trying to simulate how light works.
Anyway, the results we get now with shadow mapping, per pixel lighting and clever use of environment maps give us results pretty much indistinguishable from raytracing for a fraction of the cost: with cycles left over to have a stab at some sort of ambient occlusion and colour bleeding to simulate radiance transfer and soft shadows. Really, with the techniques we're using in realtime graphics now, the only thing I see traditional ray tracing being any good for is reflections and even then we could just be clever about doing real-time generation of environment maps in the right places and get a result that virtually identical.
Bog standard ray tracing, which is what intel are harping on about at the moment isn't the be all and end all of global illumination algorithms, as many people who get all misty eyed about the technique would have you believe. It's terrible for diffuse interactions for one thing. Photon mapping is a more realistic technique which simulates light more accurately.
As it goes, a machine running a geforce 6600 would be much better than a new machine with Intel's craptacular graphics cards. I'm been a games and graphics programmer for almost 20 years and there have always been cards that don't conform to the standards - back in the day, I hated trident cards because of their loose interpretation of the VGA spec. Intel are no better now - their cards simply don't work as advertised. The recent Microsoft vista internal email scandal and Tim's rant are about the same thing, namely the damnably frustrating ubiquity of poorly designed graphics cards from Intel. Of course, software developers get the blame but in this case, the true blame really does lie at Intel's feet. They should absolutely exit the graphics card buisness, unless they really are trying to sabotage the PC as a viable graphics and games platform.
With all these poisoned PCs out there, we have a much harder time making any kind of money from our software.
I'm really sorry for this chap's loss and, of course, there is no excuse for this kind of catastrophic and dangerous failure. However, if people need another reason to actually switch off their electronic equipment instead of putting it in sleep mode, this seems to be more compelling than what are, to many people, abstract notions of social responsibility (i.e. not wasting cumulatively vast amounts of electricity for the sake of a little convenience).
It used to be the case, with old mainframes that used large tape or disk drives, that it would be more energy efficient to leave them on all the time as the start up phase used up so much energy. This simply isn't the case any more.
When you've finished with your gadgets, switch the buggers off, It's not hard to do.
Thanks for reminding me of the collada project, I'd forgotten about it and it's good to see how well it's coming on. It should be easy to implement a reader and writer into my own software and it's really refreshing to see a human readable format that is being developed by and for the game authoring community: the VRML effort always seemed out of touch as far as what was going on in 3D games, perhaps through ignorance, snobbery or maybe just that 3D in games were quite immature back then.
It's also refreshing to see such sensible focus: it's not being billed as a new XML format that's going to revolutionize 3D (3D!) on the web and allow us all to live in gibsonesque cyber fantasies of the future, it's a being billed much more soberly as a standard medium of data exchange between 3D apps, something that's sorely needed (as anyone who's tried to write tens of 3D file import/export filters and had to make compromises with each and every one will tell you).
One thing this is not is a web format. 3D files, expressed as XML (or other HR formats) that specify models by vertices and polygons (or tri-strips/fans/edge-breaker-if-you're-lucky) are always going to be unwieldy. It's a bit like HTML specifying images pixel by pixel by using tags: e.t.c. In other words, a bit verbose for most non-trivial cases and in any case unreadable.
Tim.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't much like the 'crapsoftware' tag. Inkscape has a few rough edges but it's been a life saver many a time. Well, not literally a life saver but I have used it to do many bits of vector art and it's a lot more portable and less fuss than Adobe's software (i.e. if I'm in a fix and not at my machine yet need to do some desktop publishing, I can install it in 5 minutes and it does the job). It's also more pleasant to use than GIMP or Blender, although they're also great when I can get hold of my preferred software for those tasks.
So, massive thanks and kudos to the guy(s) behind it!
Ah, it's been around since the 14th century. Still, it's one of those words that annoys the hell out of me for reasons I can't quite understand.
Indeed, wtf is wrong with 'healthy'? I cringe whenever I see this and other pointless neologisms.
He sounded like Dr. Wallace Breen at that point.
"Tell me, Dr. Freeman, if you can. You have destroyed so much. What is it, exactly, that you have created? Can you name even one thing? I thought not."
But of course, mac users won't know this as they won't have been able to get that far in the game yet.
Hang on.. 256 colours? That can't be 256 at once, surely. The Atari ST could only do 4bits per pixel out of a palette of 512. I'm guessing that's a palette of 256 so did it have an 8bit RAMDAC? (if I'm remembering my terms correctly).
erm, more = my
To be fair, at my company, most of us do actually work sensible hours until crunch time when all bets are off. Our last crunch hurt a bit but didn't last as long as in many game companies I've heard of. Most of our relationships are still in tact and more daughter still recognises me!
As for the game designer job - it's a tough one. It's one of those jobs that I think many people think they can do and unfortunately, one that many who are put off by the more technical or artistic roles (as they sound like too much hard work) are attracted to. If you fall into that category, forget it - precisely because the remit of the job is vaguer than coding or any of the artistic disciplines, you have to show some demonstrable skill, which is hard because it's the job is less well defined.
The best game designers are not only great at designing fun games, they have a good understanding and respect of the technical side too and appreciate how much work a given feature is. There's also a lot of detailed design doc writing involved and more meetings than you can shake a stick at. For some games, in depth knowledge of a particular esoteric subject relevant to game you're working on would also be useful.
Japan still registers bikes - When I lived there, my g/f bought me one for my birthday and registered it. The police often stopped cyclists to check their registration details and as foreigner, I stood out and was checked regularly (I eventually learned where their routes were and could get to work more quickly by avoiding them). It was sometimes difficult to explain why my bike was registered under the name of a Japanese girl so I usually launched into the explanation before they checked the bike's code.
Sigh, I hate this stupid meme. at least in the U.K., we pay vehicle excise duty which no more pays for the roads than the V.A.T. on a chocolate bar. The local council are responsible for their own roads so upkeep of those comes from their coffers. I pay 33% of my earnings as income tax and on top of that I have to pay council tax. The comparatively paltry amount that we have to pay for the privilege of owning a car would not pay for the upkeep of the nations roads and motorways. On top of this, I voluntarily pay more money to Sustrans, a charity that builds cycle paths than it costs to keep the family car on the road - we only use it maybe twice a month, yet still have to pay tax.
In short, I suspect I pay a whole lot more than you do towards the upkeep of the roads and yet I find it difficult to cycle to work without putting myself in danger, caused by the noticeable minority of dangerous drivers. They're probably muttering these same ignorant missives as they force me off the road for the umpteenth time.
And as for the registration process - ha! Cars have these checks because they are an order of magnitude more complex and dangerous than bikes! If you've got a flat or bald tire on your bike, you're going to notice it pretty quickly and then will have to push your bike home as the air escapes. Riding in such a condition is more likely to hurt yourself than anybody else. To reiterate the statistics I mentioned in a previous post - 3000 deaths caused by drivers annually in the U.K. Compare that with 1 death every two years caused by a cyclist: it's a 1:6000 ratio!
This is a general reply to the blase attitude towards the very life of others that some drivers here are espousing. So If you are a reasonably considerate driver, don't take it personally.
What is more important: that you get to where you're going fractionally faster or that you have respect for the safety of other people. In my country, over 3000 people die annually due to collisions with cars and most of those people are pedestrians or cyclists. Hundreds of thousands are injured. 2008 year was a good year and 'only' 2,943 were killed (this isn't a global figure, just in the UK). That's 2,943 families now missing loved ones. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/jun/27/transport1). That's a quarter of a million people since records began, in the UK alone (extrapolate for the world's population, that'd be closer to 25 million people killed on the worlds roads in the past 84 years).
Most drivers I encounter are polite and considerate and I'm polite and considerate right back to them - if I'm holding up a bunch of cars, I'll pull over to let them past if it's safe to do so as I want them driving up my arse about as much as they want to be held up by me.
However, most days I'll encounter some retard who thinks that driving like a lunatic is their god given right - these are the people who kill people like me and they should not be allowed on the roads.
If getting from A to B as fast as possible is, in fact, more important to you than somebody else's continued existence, let me put it to you in other terms: your journey is going to take a lot longer if you have to deal with the aftermath of killing a cyclist or pedestrian because you were driving too damn fast.
Tim.
Wouldn't you get in to trouble if you kept communist's kids under your bed? On a related note, thank goodness Ronald Raygun, that clown off of that advert for fat clinics and possibly even some sort of distorted republican Jesus with guns saved us all from the evils of sharing.
Now we all work 16 hours a day to make rich people even richer (hell, it gets me out of bed in the morning. Gawd bless all those upper management and banking types, they need it more than we do) and the world is just peachy!
Tim
Which would also mean somehow open-sourcing the Unreal engine, which I'm sure Epic would be only too happy to do!
oops. Internal grammar Nazi fail.
'your' = 'you're'
Couldn't agree more to all of these, particularly the tool chain point.. but then again, I'm programming game tools right now (as in, right now, this minute, for a project that needed them at the beginning) so I may be biased.
The small army you mentioned also creates problems of its own, particularly in terms of cost and communication.
Quality is also a huge issue, particularly for PC games. The absolute maze of hardware out there is one significant factor is ramping up the costs associated with PC game development, particularly if your aiming to develop a games that shows off modern hardware and yet still work on older machines so you can still sell the thing to enough people.
Based on my own experience, I think you're absolutely right in assuming that many games companies haven't taken tools and pipeline issues seriously in the past. In my mind, getting these right is the only way to make a top notch game within a reasonable budget.
Explaining this to the powers that be is not always the easiest task for us developers.
If you haven't found it already, search for 'unity build'. It's just a technique for collating cpp files into a single file but it's slashed my build times - not to the point where where I was 15 years ago with borland pascal but still, much much quicker and a hell of a lot cheaper than incredibuild (although combined with it, even better)
Just as your ancestors all learnt to speak Cherokee, Lakota and so on. I'd say that English has as much right as Spanish to be signposted in the U.S.A. The world would be a dull place with English as the only language.
Whilst the simpler machines of yesteryear were easier to master, I don't think that it's the lack of resources that are holding kids back. :) or work on something less exciting that pays better whilst staring at the window thinking of game designs.
I had the good fortune to grow up with like minded friends and we basically taught each other to code, write 3d engines and push the hardware. Also, we all went to a decent college and went the Basic->Pascal->C/C++ route.
Most of my old school friends work at IBM now but I'm a coder in the games industry thanks to their help and encouragment (and that of the few good teachers I've encountered). The biggest assets we had were curiosity and the need to learn and improve.
Any kid today with access to a PC and with the same will to learn can get the similar start that my friends and I enjoyed- you can get a whole slew of development tools for free. I use Visual Studio express at home and if you don't like that there's always GCC, Eclipse and plenty others.
We weren't encouraged to program by anybody but ourselves and didn't have the internet, which would have made life a lot easier.
I think it's just a case of numbers. We were absolutely in the minority of kids in 1990 and the population of Britain hasn't grown that much since then. Most kids our age back then, as now, were too busy getting pissed, stoned and pregnant to bother learning how to be good at anything, yet alone something as uncool as programming.
The simple fact is that the industry has grown and demands more staff than the minority pool of self motivated kids can provide. Also, it doesn't pay us half what we're worth so graduates smart enough to do this work probably leave the country (I know I did but then I came back when the Japanese govornment decided my visa was out of date
Ah, those were the days. I used self modifying assembly to get around the problem of combinatorial explosion when writing graphics drivers; i.e. where you have lots of states that all require an optimized inner loop with slightly different operators. Sort of the equivalent of pixel shaders, only self modifying.
That, and a lot of other tricks of mine became redundant when the pentium and predictive branching took off and as such, the amount of assembly in my code has dropped to practically nil, save for a few things that can only be done quickly with the odd specialized instruction call.
Tim.
I'm a senior graphics coder for a games company in the UK but.. hang on a minute, I can read and do a variety of convincing impressions! That'd be a lot easier than all that 'chimp work' with all the maths and the C++, code design, gruelling deadlines and no royalties.
Seriously, if I could earn that much money for that amount of work then maybe my mortgage wouldn't look quite so intimidating.
Everybody deserves to be paid well for the work they put in as a function of the amount of money that their product makes. Just because your stupid voice or face is all over a product, doesn't mean that you're the most deserving of reward.
As I brush my teeth, going forward.. god it infuriates. I make a point of, wherever appropriate, stopping this hesitation filler from gaining any more traction than it already has. I know that the geek speak of we in the trenches can annoy the uninitiated but at least our acronyms mean something. This kind of managerial fluff is both grating and totally devoid of meaning, other than the images of short term thinking it evokes for me.
Tim.
I don't think you're entirely correct - ray tracing, or tracing rays and bouncing them around a scene to see what they hit is used in most rendering algorithms somewhere or other. Hell, even rasterization uses a kind of ray tracing in environment mapping: you cast a ray from the eye to the pixel being rasterized and then reflect that in to look up into a precomputed environment map. And of course, we trace rays all the time for collision detection and various other tasks.
However, straight ray tracing will give you sharp shadows and won't simulate diffuse interactions correctly unless you start casting many bundles of rays around; and that starts to get very slow very quickly. Yes, photon mapping has the use of rays and intersection tests in common with vanilla ray tracing but it goes a lot further in trying to simulate how light works.
Anyway, the results we get now with shadow mapping, per pixel lighting and clever use of environment maps give us results pretty much indistinguishable from raytracing for a fraction of the cost: with cycles left over to have a stab at some sort of ambient occlusion and colour bleeding to simulate radiance transfer and soft shadows. Really, with the techniques we're using in realtime graphics now, the only thing I see traditional ray tracing being any good for is reflections and even then we could just be clever about doing real-time generation of environment maps in the right places and get a result that virtually identical.
Bog standard ray tracing, which is what intel are harping on about at the moment isn't the be all and end all of global illumination algorithms, as many people who get all misty eyed about the technique would have you believe. It's terrible for diffuse interactions for one thing. Photon mapping is a more realistic technique which simulates light more accurately.
Tim.
As it goes, a machine running a geforce 6600 would be much better than a new machine with Intel's craptacular graphics cards. I'm been a games and graphics programmer for almost 20 years and there have always been cards that don't conform to the standards - back in the day, I hated trident cards because of their loose interpretation of the VGA spec. Intel are no better now - their cards simply don't work as advertised. The recent Microsoft vista internal email scandal and Tim's rant are about the same thing, namely the damnably frustrating ubiquity of poorly designed graphics cards from Intel. Of course, software developers get the blame but in this case, the true blame really does lie at Intel's feet. They should absolutely exit the graphics card buisness, unless they really are trying to sabotage the PC as a viable graphics and games platform.
With all these poisoned PCs out there, we have a much harder time making any kind of money from our software.
Tim L.
I'm really sorry for this chap's loss and, of course, there is no excuse for this kind of catastrophic and dangerous failure. However, if people need another reason to actually switch off their electronic equipment instead of putting it in sleep mode, this seems to be more compelling than what are, to many people, abstract notions of social responsibility (i.e. not wasting cumulatively vast amounts of electricity for the sake of a little convenience).
It used to be the case, with old mainframes that used large tape or disk drives, that it would be more energy efficient to leave them on all the time as the start up phase used up so much energy. This simply isn't the case any more.
When you've finished with your gadgets, switch the buggers off, It's not hard to do.
Tim.
Thanks for reminding me of the collada project, I'd forgotten about it and it's good to see how well it's coming on. It should be easy to implement a reader and writer into my own software and it's really refreshing to see a human readable format that is being developed by and for the game authoring community: the VRML effort always seemed out of touch as far as what was going on in 3D games, perhaps through ignorance, snobbery or maybe just that 3D in games were quite immature back then.
It's also refreshing to see such sensible focus: it's not being billed as a new XML format that's going to revolutionize 3D (3D!) on the web and allow us all to live in gibsonesque cyber fantasies of the future, it's a being billed much more soberly as a standard medium of data exchange between 3D apps, something that's sorely needed (as anyone who's tried to write tens of 3D file import/export filters and had to make compromises with each and every one will tell you).
One thing this is not is a web format. 3D files, expressed as XML (or other HR formats) that specify models by vertices and polygons (or tri-strips/fans/edge-breaker-if-you're-lucky) are always going to be unwieldy. It's a bit like HTML specifying images pixel by pixel by using tags: e.t.c. In other words, a bit verbose for most non-trivial cases and in any case unreadable.
Tim.