[Haskell-cafe] Collada, FBX, XML schemas and Haskell?

[Peter Verswyvelen]

I wanted to do some experiments with HOpenGL, and one of the things I tried is importing 3D models. 

So I searched for a library that could do that, but besides Frag, who uses the limited MD3 format, I did not find anything useful. Has any work been done on supporting that? Maybe just converting the 3D format into a series of HOpenGL calls (tools like that exists for C)?

It would be nice to support Collada, one of the two standards for 3D models in the game industry. It is fully open and has exporters for most major 3D modeling packages. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COLLADA. The other standard is FBX, but that's a proprietary format from Autodesk.

Collada comes with a full XML schema. Is it possible to convert an XML schema into Haskell data/code that automatically handles reading documents that follow the schema, as is commonly done when using Java or .NET? I looked at some XML libraries for Haskell, but could not figure out if they supported something like that. 

I can find the tools I need for C# or Java in an instance, but when it comes to Haskell I have difficulties understanding even the basic descriptions of some of the libraries ;-) Of course, that is because I'm a newbie in Haskell land and don't have a PhD degree, but it does make development in Haskell very frustrating! ;-)

Thanks,
Peter