I think beyond even VR, just having this standard markup language for building 3D scenes is amazing. My biggest gripe over modern game engines is the lack of a programmatic means for building scenes. You always end up with massive proprietary binary “scene” files that are a pain to put in VCS.

This is a necessary evil unfortunately. When loading 3D content from disk, every cycle counts. Therefore storing and parsing this content in plain text is just too inefficient. A number of 3D scenes are quite large in size as well, and benefit highly from compression.

This is admittedly a naive question— but wouldn't something between the two work well? (A-Frame is arguably akin to that already)

A 3d markup language that can be compiled? At least for prototyping, it might be useful, no?

Does that exist? Or is it a problem that's already been tossed around and buried?

This exists, it’s very common to have a human readable format for development and storage in version control that gets converted to a binary format for release. What doesn’t really exist is a common inter-engine format.

https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF

https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF/tree/master/specificati...