Posted by Dr. Willard on August 18, 2000 at 02:44:14:
One interesting idea has occurred to me, which is to read Tomb Raider data files in other game engines, especially open-sourced ones such as those for Doom or Quake or Bungie's Marathon series. The idea would be to take a TR model, such as of you-know-who, and get it into the game engine -- something that's been done with Quake models in Doom.
I've thought of doing some of this myself, and I've thought of what it would involve -- writing some plug-in and some configuration files that map game-engine states onto data-file states. I wonder if any of you others have thought of doing that. We already have enough knowledge of the model formats to be able to do this with TR1,2,3 at least.
And as to configuration files, I've come across what I think is a good format: XML. It's something like HTML, but one can define one's own tags with it, making it more of a meta-format. There is also a simple open-source parser available for it, "Expat".