Quote:Original post by Extrarius
As far as community friendly, editing files manually is not at all community friendly, whatever information they store. You really would be better served by creating editors for things that don't already have editors.
Well, what I should have pointed out is that it's a
lazy form of community friendly. It doesn't really require any effort from programmers or marketing, whilst putting out a toolset post-release (Usually) requires some additional clean-up to be done by the programmers, as internal-only dev tools are generally raw, ugly and error-prone. Then it normally needs to have a look-over by the legal department to make sure nothing incriminating is released with the dev-tools (How many of you, even breifly for testing, have had and error dialog or log entry that contained profanity?).
It's more effort than most developers are willing to spend/publishers are willing to give, so most games either don't have toolsets released at all, or only have shitty little half-working plugins released. Text formats allow the community to take a stab at writing their own tools, which will probably get far more support than dev-released tools would.
(I'm not saying I agree with this practice, it's just the way it is a great deal of the time)
Quote:
For extensibility, binary formats can be just as extensible by using some kind of 'tagged format' somewhat like the TIFF image format or WAV audio format.
For sure, as a matter of fact one of the primary goals of my (Binary) file format is to be extensible without breaking the format (My previous format was really getting on my nerves as I had to modify the exporter, synchronise the loader and re-export ALL the assets whenever I wanted to add a tiny new feature).