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 plan to use 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, 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