Sunday, December 28, 2008

Standards and Standardisation

Apologies for coming over a bit Jane Austen in the title.

It's bothered me for some time that we don't have any proper standardisation. This has resulted in a lot of engines going off and storing (and looking for) custom content in all sorts of weird places. Someone actively developing a new engine has a few options: (1) just copy what DarkPlaces does, (2) do it similar to how Quake II and III do it based on the assumption that people will be expecting that, (3) do what seems like a good idea at the time.

I favour (2) above, but you still can't keep everybody happy, particularly in cases where (1) is different. So I decided to let the user choose for themselves:



This is just a first cut so hence the "not very robust" warning, but so far it works fine in all normal cases. A few bugs include changing "textures" won't flush already loaded textures, handling spaces in content directories is not quite working, user choices don't actually become active until the configs are loaded, and now that I'm letting the user specify these I need to do some validation on the input. But it's like I said, a first cut.

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