addExternalArchiveLoader possible / good idea?

[loki1985]

hi folks.

first of all, i want to mention that in my opinion one of the absolute strong points for Irrlicht is addExternalMeshLoader() and addExternalImageLoader(). as most of you will know this gives the possibility to create a loader for image or mesh formats of existing games or applications.

now, i am able to write loaders for models and textures this way. but i am missing the possibility to write loaders for 3rd-party archive formats. having ZIP support is absolutely great and gives a lot of possibilities, but a lot of games use their own format for storing files (most of them are pretty easily decodable).

what do you guys think? i would absolutely love to have such an interface in future Irrlicht releases.

[bitplane]

Yes, this is already planned... Haven't got much time at the moment but I'd really like to add transparently cd-ing into archives using pluggable archive loaders, fix the case sensitivity and other path issues, add in possibilities for asynchronous loading (via filesystem events), all using a nice clean interface.
I have one kind-of-half-designed and have even made a start on the code, but I haven't had time to mess with it in several months but I still hope to have this done for Irrlicht 1.5

[fmx]

this would be pretty neat, as it would also make it easier to load in our own custom file-archives and not just rely on zip all the time, or hardcoding our own modified un-zippers

looking forward to seeing it in Irrlicht 1.5 bitplane!

[hybrid]

(No, bitplane has many other stuff todo for Irrlicht 1.5. Wait for it in Irrlicht 1.6)

[bitplane]

yeah maybe you're right