Previous version of the exporters and importers were using a temporary storage mechanism. First the Maya/Max internal structure was browsed to create a COLLADA in-memory snapshot, and then this snapshot was exported in XML. Same mechanism backward for the importer. Problem with this is that the data gets allocated twice, and as everyone knows the data can be quite large, so large that it immediatly sends the computer in memory swap and it takes just forever to get a large model exported or imported (if you are lucky)

The new Max/Maya plug-ins are taking advantage of direct streaming, and SAX XML parsing, removing this intermediate memory alocation, and at the same time allowing further optimizations.

For example, importing a 60MB COLLADA file into 3dsMAX takes 1.8sec with the new SAX based approach, in comparison to the previous FCOLLADA based importer: 39.7sec.

Give it a try.. let me know if you think about this.

PS: This is a  Beta importer, the exporters are almost full feature and **fast**. Importers are not as complete - missing material, textures, polygons, shader - supported: mesh (triangles..), scene (node..)

Softimage has posted a plug-in free to download. I am wondering if this plug-in works also with the free XSI Mod Tool ? This could provide a really sophisticated tool to create mods for CryENGINE 2.

It is a really great move from Crytek and Softimage, but wait ... ! The press release says: "The combination of SOFTIMAGE|XSI software and COLLADA integration with the CryENGINE 2 is opening new doors in the realm of 3D imaging and character creation for next-generation games."

So what is going on here is that Crytek has opened COLLADA content to flow into their engine. So the data exported by this new plug-in is open and available in the COLLADA format. I understand that it must be using some <extra> tags and naming conventions to fit perfectly CryENGINE 2 needs, which is what is recommended for game developers to extend COLLADA to their own needs.

This made my head spin a bit, since this opens to a lot of possibilities to the mod community. Having access to the data in an open XML format should foster innovation.

So now I have tons of questions for Softimage and Crytek, and how lucky I am, they are both on the panel tomorrow :-)

As you probably know, Marcus and I are deeply involved in the COLLADA project. We started it at SCE and, thanks to SCE's genuine desire to help the game developer community, contributed it as an open standard to The Khronos Group. The community of users and developers taking advantage of this technology has grown steadily, and many companies in and out of the video game industry are now relying on the existance of this technology for their businesses..

And the good news is that COLLADA has a big role to in our new project! And Intel has therefore became an active contributor, adding to the ever growing number of companies supporting this effort. And more concretely please allow me to proudly announce Intel's COLLADA involvement at GDC 2008.

There will be a COLLADA demo station on the Intel booth (#5917). This is a generous investment that Intel is providing and we have invited many ISV to demonstrate the power of their COLLADA tools, running on Intel hardware of course.

The schedule shows that 6 companies (Luxology, Softimage, Adobe, Feeling Software, Geomerics, Gamr7) each have half a day to demonstrate new products and describe how COLLADA has helped them and their customers.

Some of those companies are well known already within the user community and they will be showing new ways of taking advantage of COLLADA, such as a web-browser embedded COLLADA viewer from Feeling Software, or the new nested reference model / delta nodes in XSI 6.5 from Softimage as described in this month's issue of Game Developer Magazine, or the COLLADA importer into Photoshop from Adobe that enables artists to visualize and edit textures on 3D models without wasting time exporting/importing into another 3D package.

Thanks to the flexibility of COLLADA and the computational power that Intel CPUs are providing to multi-threaded applications, I invite you to visit the intel booth according to the schedule to witness Geomerics' real-time global illumincation technology, Gamr7's procedural city generator, and Luxology's modeling and rendering solution that can all be easily integrated in a game content pipeline thanks to COLLADA.

In addition to contributing space on the booth, Intel is also sponsoring a "COLLADA in the Game" panel, Wednesday at noon. I invite you to come with many questions for our panelists from Adobe, Crytek, Luxology, Midway, and Softimage. This will make my life easier since as the panel moderator I will just have to let you do all the work!

There should me many more references to COLLADA at GDC, such as NVIDIA's FX Composer 2 presentation.

Looking forward to GDC.