[ODE] ODE GUI Editor #2...

[Martin C. Martin]

For once I agree with Jon Watte.  For my ODE simulation, I wrote out the 
  state of the simulation at every tick.  The position & rotation of 
every body, as well as a bunch of stuff about what the AI was thinking. 
  I did it in XML, as a way to explore the format.  The files ended up 
being a couple gigabytes.  After a couple runs, my name started 
appearing in the "top disk users" report.  At least they compressed down 
pretty well.

The idea of a file that knows something of its own structure is very 
powerful and long overdue.  But basing it on text may not be the right idea.

I'm actually ambivalent, there are advantages to XML too.  I could open 
my XML files with Internet Explorer, and it could "lint" them for me. 
There are lots of XML parsers around (although I had to write my own 
anyway.)

Something more like the IFF file format may be best.

Jon Watte wrote:

>>Back in the days of 16 MHz 80286 machines with 20 MB hard drives there were
>>good reasons to use binary file formats, but they are all invalid now.
> 
> 
> Take your favorite current game. Sit there, waiting at the load screen. Would you want to double the load times? I've found parsing XML -> binary is much slower than 2x the time of just loading, but parsing isn't all that's happening during load.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> 					/ h+
> 
> 
> 
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