[ODE] ODE GUI Editor #2...

[William Denniss]

On Thu, 2004-02-26 at 12:13, John Miles 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.
> >
> 
> That's more an indictment of scanf() than it is of binary files. :)
> 
> In the engine I'm working with now, I can parse a 1MB text file in about 5%
> of the time than it takes to construct the objects it specifies.

hence the advantage of XML (very fast parsing) or any text format if you
use regexp to parse it

text files are also more interoperable - sure if you want to come up
with a binary format to speed your games loading time then you are free
to do so, and this editor already has one.  For ease of use however it
is nice to have a text export option so other applications (and your own
software) can import it.

Cheers,

Will.