Skeletal animation

[bbmario]

Is skeletal animation too hard for DC? Should we stick to rendering MD2 or is it able to support something like IQM?

[Corbin]

3DGE supports MD5 models, which is a skeletal format, so they are definitely possible on Dreamcast.

Those are also inherently faster formats to render since skeletal models do not have to store vertex frames in the model itself (with MD2/MD3, every frame of animation is the model itself duplicated), which leads to smaller file sizes. Rather, MD5 uses an external animation file that loads to control the skeletal mesh directly, bypassing keyframes altogether therefore making them easier to render.

In theory IQM should be possible too (any bare-bones model format), but this depends on what engine these formats are going in and how they are being used.

[PH3NOM]

That is true, you can pretty much do anything you want in software; but keep in mind, MD5 models are designed for GPU's with hardware t&l, which the DC's PVR GPU does not have, so all transformations are done on the DC's SH4 CPU.

You must make a decision between memory vs cpu consumption when considering what model format you will use on DC.