Re: System file reorganisation

[Jorrit Tyberghein]

David Philippi wrote:
> On Sunday 27 October 2002 14:10, Ingo Ruhnke wrote:
>
> > Anyway, the whole concept behind system.cxx, path_finder.cxx and Co.
> > is not really usable. What we need is a unified resource management
> > system, that completly abstracts away from the underlying system and
> > which allows loading of all resouces Pingus uses (sounds, graphics,
> > levelfiles, savegames, etc.), not just a few.
>
>
> Well then we should probably code such a managment system. We'll still a OS 
> abstraction layer and it seems that no one has experience with creating such. 
> The probably best course would be to study a working abstraction layer of 
> another application and copy it's methodic. I don't see any reason to invent 
> the wheel anew (especially not such a difficult and error prone one).
> Does anyone know a good example to learn from? The only app with a good, 
> explicit abstraction layer I know is ACE which is unfortunately very complex. 
> If need be I'll try to descry how this works but I'm open to other 
> suggestions.

I'm not sure if this is appropriate but I'm the project manager of
Crystal Space (http://crystal.sf.net). While traditionally CS is seen
as a 3D engine it is in fact a complete application framework. As
a framework CS has support for platform independent:

        - Loading of images (png, jpg, tga, gif, ...)
        - Loading of sounds (wav, ...)
        - Plugin system (platform independent) with dynamic
          loading.
        - Abstraction of the file system through a virtual
          file system (in a platform independent way and also
          capable of reading/writing into zip files transparently).

And much more. While I'm not sure that CS is the best choice to do
this it is at least a possibility.

You can use the above mentioned parts of CS without the 3D engine
and even without using the graphics subsystem at all. So you can still
use SDL for graphics (or whatever) and only use the subset of
CS that interests you (i.e. plugin system, virtual file system,
image loaders, ...).

If you would be interested in this then I'm fully prepared to
help you with this.

Greetings,