hello,

Because of the way my game's multiplayer is going to work, we'll need to have a different way of loading levels to ensure client-server equalness.
The server will not be running Esenthel, and anything that matters to the gameplay will need to be loaded by the server (which is everything except for terrain and non-physics + non-interacting objects (grass, world particles, etc)).
Now, since Esenthel's world files are all encoded/compressed/encrypted/whatever, they can not be read by any other app. And having to save everything but terrain and grass in a separate file, we would only be able to use Esenthel's world editor for making terrain and grass.
So my request here is the possibility to save world files in a human-readable format, so that they can be read by our server.


Although not totally needed, the same thing would be nice for .mtrl files
And also, I don't understand the need to convert all textures into .gfx files. Would be nice if the engine could load .tga's and other common formats, making it easier to make graphical changes to textures (avoiding the need to, for any change you make, open the Mesh Editor then convert the texture into .gfx and save again)

later

"client-server equalness"

as i understand it (by reading your post), all you infact need is some, perhaps MD5/CRC, check of the files (client), and verify that with servers MD5/CRC filelist.

If the CRC is the same on both, the file is the same, if not, well, then its not the same , im using that for my client patcher software for my game project.

It does not need to be plain text for that, it takes under a second to check all the files in a directory, and it can "patch" or download a new file if it doesnt excists or is wrong CRC.

you can access the heightmap data inside the game (by accessing area data, and then mesh, and then export it to text files (which is supported via mesh::saveTxt or something like that) remember that meshes in world "game" version have only Mshr (renderables set) so you need to create first MeshBase from them MeshBase::create(Mshr &mshr);

Quote:Would be nice if the engine could load .tga's and other common formats

no, it takes significantly longer time to load tga's combine them together, generate mip maps, compress and stuff than just pregenerated optimized .gfx