Assets

Assets are classified as either Primitive or Aggregate. Primitive assets MUST contain only information about themselves, while aggregate assets MAY contain references to other assets.

Planned primitives:

• Image
• Mesh
• Audio
• Input action map
• Shader

Planned aggregates:

• Material (shader + images)
• Model (mesh + materials)
• Construct (fixed-length transform hierarchy)
• Level

File format

This section is a work in progress. I may end up implementing a custom format that requires very little processing to deserialize.

In the meantime, I’m using Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) for serialization, as it provides some desired attributes to the asset files:

• Named fields to avoid data loss when struct definitions change
• Small file size
• Existing Odin core library

File loading

Inspiration from Timothy Cain’s video, Arcanum “dat” files, development builds use a raw OS file system, or “loose assets”, while release builds use packed bundles.

• data locality on the disk
• “seek” is much faster than “open”
• avoid file descriptor limits
• less overhead for many tiny assets (block alignment, OS file nodes)
• easy patches/modding with sequential overriding of the asset database
• more efficient compression