XML. (was: Re: [ODE] outputting objects)

[Chris Brodie]

On the general subject of storing coordinates you need to agree on the packing format, even for euler angles. For example Rus had me scratching me head for a few days wondering why my object affected by gravity always fell to the left and my back \ forward controls move me up \ down. 

This affects the xforms as well. Left \ Right handed. Should the format be specific enough so that you don't need to refer to the doco to understand it or should it be implementation specific with implied knowledge in the formatting.

On a slight tangent I'd like to recommend using the boost::tokenizer (or coding something similar) rather than using hard coded decomposition of values with multiple fragments for anything from Colour="1 0.5 0.5" through to the matrix cases.

We still havent decided on a half decent XML parser to use. I havent used libxml so maybe someone else can comment, I'm sure it's cross platform. I still like expat, but I nearly use TinyXML a while back which I think was crossplatfom. Probably the bst thing to do is to just write a generic XMLparser interface class that does the basic work we need then allow a different implementation based on people's requirements. I can probably code up a xerces based implementation perhaps even an expat based one.

The only unusual thing I put in all of my file parser\loading classes is the ability to accep a memory buffer rather than enforcing use of file loading internally. Reason being I support loading from zip\pak files that if compressed need to be decomposed in to a memory buffer.

Thoughts?


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