Re: XML was RE: [GD-General] RE: A portable preferences library

[Noel L. <ll...@co...>]

On Tue, 16 Dec 2003 12:42:45 -0000
"Alen Ladavac" <ale...@cr...> wrote:

> Also, in case that zipping really does remove the redundancy well enough to
> allow us to ignore the size difference, did you check your effective loading
> throughput? Meaning how much MB/sec can you read from the disk. To make sure
> that the parser is not slowing your loading. Ideally, you should be limited by
> the transfer rate of the disk, not by the CPU.
> 
> Please bear with me here... I have no problems with converting, but I must
> make sure that it is _the_ true religion. ;)

I think that looking at XML as the final format to load assets in the
game is missing the point.

XML is great for many of the things listed here, but sometimes (only
sometimes), it makes sense to use a different format to optimize
load/parse times.

For instance, we export all of our models, hierarchy, meshes, and
materials into an XML format. Artists can take those files and drop
them straight in the game and everything will work fine. However, our
resource build will convert all geometry into optimized, binary
formats that can be loaded with no overhead, because we profiled it
and determined it *did* make a difference (and working on console
games, it's one of those things that really matters).

There are some formats we haven't bothered changing from XML (hierarchy,
materials, etc) since the amount of time loading them and parsing them
is negligible compared to the rest of the load times.


--Noel