[Ohrrpgce] SVN: pkmnfrk/2428 Breaking the ground on my XML idea. for the time being, I'm not hacking

David Gowers 00ai99 at gmail.com
Thu Nov 6 01:00:56 PST 2008


On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 5:21 PM, Ralph Versteegen <teeemcee at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I think the whole idea of replacing the current format with a textual
> markup is a bit crazy because:
>
> 1) If game had to be decompiled and recompiled every time it was
> played, that would really blow out already totally awful loading
> times.

In my fairly modest experiments in this area, my testing led me to the
following conclusions:
* textual format for a game editor is a REALLY GOOD IDEA (consider the
meta stuff that is possible.. like, proper internationalization all
done from the same source files (.po!), just compiling to a specific
target language)
* textual format for a game runner is just as equally a bad idea
* textual format for savegames has some significant merit (that can be
indirectly achieved if you can get a full textual dump from the saves
with a tool, like you can for HDF5.). One of the really big wins for
textual save formats is they're easy to expand.

>
> Actually, I want to look at ways to shorten the current unlump and
> upgrade process. Unlumping large games takes ages, and typically some
> major lump get expanded every month or two meaning nearly every game
> needs to be upgraded to be played.
>
> First of all, I'm going to revive Neo's plan on bugzilla from eons ago
> (bug 92) with the additional suggestion that lumps don't need to be
> expanded if the new data doesn't have to be written to (to be
> initialized with non zero default data): the wrappers will hide the
> fact that the actual lump data is smaller.
Okay, I wondered why you did that (I actually thought 'why did I write
that, again?' when I looked at it), makes sense to me now.

>
> 2) RPG filesize bloat. The big lumps, graphics and tilemaps, usually
> compress very highly. Even when compressed, XML descriptions are
> probably going to be many times the size of the binary file
> uncompressed. Which should mean that they'll end up taking up most of
> the space in a compressed RPG file.
I think you should run some tests before claiming that. (for example,
openoffice ODT format is XML+resources in a zipfile, and is
competitive with .DOC, a binary format.). AFAIK it depends on the
concreteness of your data; so encoding tilemaps or graphics is a big
loss, encoding other things like formationsets or items can be a win.

http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch05s01.html

David

-- 
Reticience and self-censorship is a farce.  The deceiver does not
himself know the truth, anything that he holds back he holds back not
only from others but from himself. Fuck censorship. "I yam what I yam'



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