Open discussion: What game devs need from Delphi

[WILL]

Now, you can argue that it is a pain, but is it really that much more a pain than using some kind of text parser? It is easy enough to encapsulate the details of a binary storage class which takes care of any endianness normalization (and plenty of libraries do).

I find FPC's included XML libraries to be really quite spiffy.

Since I had to fight with Lazarus for months to keep using binary files to do something that just clicked and worked in a matter of hours with XML. Easy choice!

[Murmandamus]

I find FPC's included XML libraries to be really quite spiffy.

Since I had to fight with Lazarus for months to keep using binary files to do something that just clicked and worked in a matter of hours with XML. Easy choice!

Were you doing the binary file stuff from scratch? O.o

I mean, I don't know your application specifics, but there are various binary serialization/storage libraries out there which are a snap to use, depending on your needs.

[WILL]

Were you doing the binary file stuff from scratch? O.o

I mean, I don't know your application specifics, but there are various binary serialization/storage libraries out there which are a snap to use, depending on your needs.

Yes I was. I don't care for bloat and unnecessary build up of dependencies so XML was another win for me since it was already included with FPC.

The added benefit to using XML was that I now was able to open up any text editor and edit my levels without having to use specific or custom-made tools. Further adding features or storing new information you could potentially break your in-house design tools and corrupt your game forcing you to use something like a hex editor to conform it. Where text is much easier to open and read.


Bringing the thread back on topic though; You can see that databases are nowhere near as usful for storing game data as other methods.

[Murmandamus]

Yeah, for most non-MMO-type games, a RDBMS is totally useless. Game content doesn't need it, but many games do use a library-style custom (often binary) format for game data. A few of them even use zip files and incorporate zlib to access them. <.<

Even still, it all depends on what you're storing and how you need to access it. Each format/methodology has its advantages and disadvantages for different needs.