xml vs binary file ?

[kschn]

Hello ^^

We're writing a kind of robot's simulator using irrlicht for all the 3d, and we decided to record simulations video.
It's the same idea of the demos in quake3 for example. I've done this using the built-in xml parser in irrlicht.
And suprise ... it works ... and it's really fast ... much much more than I though it would be.

I was planning to create a binary file format for saving thoses videos ... but seeing how fast is irrlicht's xml handling I now wonder ...

My question may sounds stupid because it depends on how well or bad you design your file format ...

But has anyone ever compared perfs between a file format and xml ?

[Halan]

i dont know much about binary file formats but i think xml is of course easier to handle on the other hand the xml-files are bigger afaik

greets,
Halan

[vitek]

You can actually store XML in a binary format. There are several libraries for doing binary XML for decreased memory footprint and file size.