[ODE] File formats, was Re: .NET wrapper

[Anselm Hook]

> And of course we still have to deal with non VC7 users (not that I'm
> one of them) so a generic XML solution is desired. While on Windows XP
> I prefer Xerces-C and previously Expat, (both solid cross platform XML
> parsers) just so I can go cross platform later without too much pain.

The main problem I've encountered in the past is having some kind of
object reflection.  Something has to reflect the internal data-structures
that get composed.  This is going to have to be Lua, or Java, or .net ...
or by hand...  or with some kind of IDL compiler scheme.

You have to reflect the XML into live memory and you have to be able to go
the other way as well.  You have all this *stuff* in memory - effectively
binary - and you need to spit out intelligent XML from it...

On a C based game we've been doing we've been using an XSD scheme quite
successfully; we describe our actual C data-structures in an XSD based IDL
and then actually manufacture C struct headers out of the XSD.  This gives
us complete reflection and even runtime tweaking capabilities...  we can
do insane things like take the XSD graph and render an interactive
structured scene-graph to say an HTML browser via XSLT and edit live game
state...  it is BLTA - better living through acronyms.

 - a