My plan is to possibly have the data in an easily tweakable format, but it will be run through a pre-processing step before the game code sees it to convert it to a binary format that closely matches the way in which the game code will use it. This binary file will be placed into an archive of some sort (similar to a PAK file) that the game uses.

This means
- very little processing time is required to load the file (load the file into memory, fix up some pointers and that's it)
- less temporary memory used (instead of loading the file into temporary memory, processing it into a format the game uses, then freeing the temporary memory)
- quicker load times (less time spent processing the file)
- memory management is easier to handle

The game will never load intermediate formats such as XML directly. They will always be pre-processed to a game-friendly version.

The steps in this procedure will be:
1. Content creation (Blender, gmax, text editor, etc)
2. Export to intermediate format (XML, MD2, txt, etc)
3. Pre-processing (convert intermediate formats to binary formats the game expects)
4. Archive creation (concatenate pre-processed files into one large file)
5. Run the game (game opens the archive)
6. Game loads file (reads the pre-processed file from the archive)