Asset Pipeline

[chutchinson]

The editor needs an asset pipeline . Presently the editor assumes all resources will be loaded from individual files, and has no ability to load files in other formats or convert assets into more suitable formats for the game engine.

Areas of necessity include:

• Asset abstractions
• Asset serialization infrastructure
• Asset references
• Asset transforms (legacy -> new, mp3 -> ogg, etc)

[goblinJoel]

There have been a couple of discussions on changing the serialization format from binary to JSON, XML, or whatever Lua uses. I don't believe a final decision on that has been made, so hold off on anything that directly affects that.

[chutchinson]

I'm referring mostly to building the architecture (code) that will compose the pipeline, not writing actual serialization routines. Ideally the formats would remain as a binary format because that's the most efficient serialization format and saves battery life, time, etc. That does not imply; however, that human-readable or web-friendly versions cannot exist in tandem.

[goblinJoel]

Since we're trying to use the issue tracker more, I'll just note here that I've filled in some of the gaps in the asset pipeline on the json branch. So if you see something that needs to be added, check out the json branch first to see if it's already been done.