Deprecate the Blender "Better" Collada exporter in favor of glTF2, ESCN and FBX #2130
Comments
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I still it's still a useful addon, and some of the work from thirdparty forks to support recent Blender versions could be merged upstream. We don't have anyone to maintain it in the core team but we could add new maintainers if there are community contributors who want to pick up the torch for this plugin. If you're interested, feel free to make it known here (there might have been candidates already in issues/PRs on the collada-exporter repo but I have to admit that I wasn't able to follow discussions there for a long time). Still, I agree that it should not be recommended in its current state, so we can remove it from the download page. |
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Is still useful and can be converted into that promissed Blender -> exported Godot Scene .escn format that I don't remember if it was ever implemented. Could it be turned into a plugin instead of being completely dropped? |
The Blender ESCN exporter does exist, but it's not that well-maintained either due to a lack of contributors. There are options available to convert Collada files to glTF, such as COLLADA2GLTF. |
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Should we now deprecate and remove from the download page ESCN plugin? As mentioned, it is not really maintained, and would be completely obsolete in Godot 4 with blend file support. |
Indeed, I think we can also consider the ESCN Blender exporter to be deprecated for 4.0. |
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Collada support was discussed in the maintainers chat a few days before I posted this comment. The TL;DR of the discussion was that we are fine with keeping Collada support as it is now, there are some people using it and it's mostly working fine for them. Even though it's not actively maintained and there are better alternatives, there's not really a strong reason to drop it or mark it as deprecated, at least for the near future. |
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To be clear, we aren't going to mark it as deprecated just yet, because there is a potential for it being worked on in the foreseeable future, and it's important for certain gamedev markets. If this does no happen, then it is as good as dead, because there are just too many issues with the Collada support for anyone to rely on this as a feature. |
Describe the project you are working on
The Godot editor 🙂
Describe the problem or limitation you are having in your project
The "Better" Collada exporter Blender add-on is clearly lacking maintenance, and it seems no one in the core team has time to dedicate to it. Its latest official version doesn't support Blender 2.8, so most users have resorted to using forks nowadays.
At the same time, formats like glTF 2.0 have become more popular. Even FBX support has been implemented and rewritten since the "Better" Collada exporter was introduced in 2014. The ESCN exporter has also been released in that time frame.
Describe the feature / enhancement and how it helps to overcome the problem or limitation
Deprecate the "Better" Collada exporter Blender add-on and formally announce it as being unmaintained.
Note: This proposal does not suggest removing Godot's Collada importer. I think it's important to still be able to import Collada scenes, especially as people may be porting older projects to Godot 4.0.
Describe how your proposal will work, with code, pseudo-code, mock-ups, and/or diagrams
N/A (see above)
If this enhancement will not be used often, can it be worked around with a few lines of script?
No.
Is there a reason why this should be core and not an add-on in the asset library?
This proposal is about taking a decision.
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