XML support

[multiverseuser]

Hello,

I was looking where the armored-swordman came from and I noticed that the use XML
to store information about the game.

http://glest.wikia.com/wiki/Modify_Glest
The file structure above shows some of the details

http://glest.wikia.com/wiki/Unit_name.xml
http://glest.wikia.com/wiki/Upgrade_name.xml
http://glest.wikia.com/wiki/Faction_name.xml
http://glest.wikia.com/wiki/Resource_name.xml
http://glest.wikia.com/wiki/Tech_name.xml


For example DOOM uses a PK3 file format which is nothing more that a ZIP file renamed.
They store everything in there:
Sounds, mesh, textures, maps,particles,etc.

I know python-ogre uses zip packages to compress and/or group things.
I do like this. It keeps the number of files small.

what are your thoughts on zip and xml?

thanks,

[SirGolan]

I'm not a big fan of XML. It attempts to be both human editable and machine writable, but generally ends up being one or the other. The INI style config files that MV3D uses right now work great for what they do, I feel. MV3D used to have an XML config file, and it was impossible to read and edit by hand.

MV3D's persistence engine uses a custom object store built on top of pickle. In this coming release, I'm hoping to change that up a bit and while I may still use pickle, I'd like to have the back end be SQLite (via Divmod's Axiom most likely). That's still in the planning phase right now though.

Zip files are great.. Ogre supports them and Python can import from them. They should be useful for bundling assets into a single download (including python code assets).

[ldlework]

As a random passer by from the depths of the internet I can say that I have had nothing but utter enjoyment from the utility that Axiom provides. The only problem I had was having some sort of graphical interface to manage my data. There is no existing implementation for this so we had to create one. It was hard but not compared to the kind of work you're already doing here.

Move to Axiom. If you're already Twisted based, move to Axiom immediately.

[SirGolan]

Yeah, Axiom is pretty great. I've used it for a few web apps before. Though I have had a tough time fitting it in to MV3D. I have a branch around where it is used everywhere, but unfortunately, there were some problems. Right now, I'm doing an intermediate step of using it as the back end to my own object store. That will at least get some data safety until I figure out a better way to integrate it.

[SirGolan]

Axiom FTW.. New MV3D persistence using Axiom as the back end is in SVN trunk now.