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

[Richard S. <Ric...@ei...>]

<snippage>

> > not performance. As others have pointed out besides me, you should=20
> > convert to binary formats for runtime loading.
> Although it seems this is not agreed upon by all, which surprises me.

Because I think people are looking at what is meant by 'data' =
differently.

If data is, for exmaple, seed data for an emergent behaviour which is
user modifiable, then leaving it in XML text makes complete sense.

If it is scene information which is loaded and used inside the game =
cycle
then it would be a madness not to optimise it as much as possible.

Pretty much everything falls between the two extremes, so there will =
always
be cases for both.

Oddly enough, there is no single right or wrong way of looking at these=20
issues because there is no single right definition of game data.

Rich