The Broken Hourglass Monday Update
-
Category: News ArchiveHits: 830
One of the major design goals of WeiNGINE was to make it easy for developers to create playable material with a minimum of fuss, and without the need for several specialized "editors" to create game content. Instead, almost everything which represents on-screen or behind-the-scenes gamecode is stored in a plaintext XML data file. For Planewalker Games itself, it means that we do not have to spend valuable development time creating and then maintaining a raft of individual file editors, and our designers can create Broken Hourglass material on virtually any computer with access to a common text editor.
This is also of particular interest to modders because it eliminates what in the past has been a learning curve that can take years to overcome. Most game engines optimize their data files for compactness and speed in processing, rendering them machine-readable only. To understand the contents of the data files, one either needed access to development documentation (which many developers are reluctant to provide), or to reverse-engineer the data files and develop browser and editor programs specially suited to translating the game bytecode into human-readable text.
