Question

I am looking for a convenient client side only format for persisting 3d scene data
Would Google protocol buffers serve as good format for persisting and loading complete scene data for a scene exported from say 3d s max or blender?
I mean the mesh, animation and scene data would be stored in the protobuf format client side and loaded from a game (there is no client server interaction as of now…but might be in future versions…so I assume protobufs would always provide that flexibility)?

Answer 1

I guess it is a valid solution and I thought about trying this out myself. Google uses the protocol buffers for their internal data processing because they are able to store the data in a very compact way (unlike e.g. XML) while also allowing extensibility of the data structures (new fields can be added to a structure and the old code can still read it).

I’d say giving it a try would definitely not hurt.