Hi,
During the journey of creating my 2nd 3D engine, I'm basing quite some of the approaches on the Game Engine Architecture book (Jason Gregory). I've now arrived on the topic: IO.
In short, the target platforms for me are PC, XBone and PS4.
With this main assumption I thought of the following logics/ guidelines to follow:
- I can assume file/folder structures will work on all 3 platforms, when I use '/' as a folder separator
-- I will define 1 global with the base folder for the application, the rest will 'inherit' from there
(which can be anything, independent of the 'mount' or drive)
-- for now I'll create 1 subfolder with data/files that might need write access, so later on I only have to worry about 1 subfolder (settings, configs etc.).
- file extensions can be longer than 3 characters (in Linux based FreeBSD on PS4)
- all class members functions needing to load a file, shouldn't have to now about the file structure of the logical application, so they will all take a full filename string including path
(combining root + subfolder + filename and separators is then the responsibility of the caller/ calling code)
- some functions will need to be passed a folder, because contents in that folder need to be read OR I can simply define a small list of defined subfolders (under root/ base), because it won't be more then 5 to 10 folders in total (data/shaders, data/textures, data/objects, data/sound etc.)
My questions:
- what do you think about this approach?
- regarding the last point, which of the 2 options would you apply?
-- option 2 might work fine but feels a bit 'static', not very flexible (on the other hand, would you actually need flexibility here?)
Any input is appreciated, as always.
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