I’m NOT talking about converting 4vertex to 3vertex polygons. (CTRL+T)
I’m looking for a Python script for Blender that exports geometry as triangle-strips.
This is so the PVR processor in the Dreamcast can render them fast.
Doesn’t matter how old, as long as it works with some version of Blender.
Many people have written these. All links are dead now.
A friend of mine having the same “problem” importing blender geometries in opengl. Do you find any solution or does someone has new ideas to this topic?
If you already have an algorithm for getting a spanning tree out of your mesh, you can generate consecutive triangles by traversing the tree twice.
I don’t know where it says that task is NP-Complete. I would like to know though. 
In case you are still wondering about NP-completeness, you might want to take a look into the following paper: http://www.ams.sunysb.edu/~jsbm/papers/p151-mitchell.pdf
It claims to show the “k-STRIPABILITY” problem is NP-complete.
I just saw I was a bit short on the subject with my last post.
As it contained a link to the relevant paper “Optimal decomposition of polygonal models into triangle strips” (Regina Estkowski, Joseph S. B. Mitchell, Xinyu Xiang. Proceedings of Symposium on Computational Geometry 2002) it still seems to be awaiting moderator approval.
In the meantime I will try to clarify things.
Don’t get things wrong: Nobody claims dissecting a mesh into an arbitrary dissection of triangle strips is NP-complete.
Obviously calculating an arbitrary dissection is quite easy to do. Even a list containing every single triangle of a mesh with n triangles is a dissection into n triangle strips of length 1.
It is the problem of computing an optimal dissection into triangle strips that is NP-comlete.
Optimal in the sense, that it is made of a minimal number of triangle strips.
Given the fact that the k-STRIPABILITY problem is NP-complete, it is quite easy to see the problem of computing an optimal dissection into triangle strips is NP-complete by reduction:
If I were able to solve the optimal triangle strip dissection problem in polynomial time, I could solve the k-STRIPABILITY in polynomial time as well by just comparing the number of triangle strips in the optimal dissection to k.
Regarding the promised link to the paper “Optimal decomposition of polygonal models into triangle strips” (Regina Estkowski, Joseph S. B. Mitchell, Xinyu Xiang. Proceedings of Symposium on Computational Geometry 2002), I am sorry to tell you I will not be able to hold that promise.
I guess it was rule “4. Limited Rights on new users” section “b. No URLs allowed in posts”, that lead to one of the shortest memberships in my lifetime. So I will not try to post it again. 
Unverifyable assumptions don’t seem to be a very stable ground to build upon.
Nevertheless my hands are bound on that subject. 
Trying to clarify things a bit the k-STRIPABILITY problem mentioned above is that of answering the question if a given triangle mesh can be dissected into a set of k triangle strips.
In case you want to check the proof of NP-completeness of that problem yourself, you will have to get your hands on the referenced document yourself.
If asking the search engine of your choice doesn’t turn up any usable results, you might want to try the english wikipedia article on “triangle strip” as it contains a link to the named document as well.