[physfs] Matroska (EBML) as a custom game format

[Jason McKesson]

On Tuesday, April 17, 2012 9:56:15 PM, Kip Warner wrote:
> Hey list,
>
> I'd like to ask if anyone has given any consideration into using EBML
> as the basis for a game engine's custom game archive format. I asked
> over on the EMBL mailing list, but there isn't much activity there. I'd
> be interested in hearing other people's thoughts on this. Discussion
> welcome.
>
> For those who don't already know, it's the format used to implement the
> Matroska multimedia container format.
>
> Some of the advantages I came up with,
>
> * Enables extendability for future format changes

What future format changes? You're just packing files together; what 
future extension do you need?

> * Can contain arbitrary metadata on top of skeletal animation data,
> geometry, textures, material shaders, scripts, and so on.

... and? I don't see how this is useful for games. Generally, if your 
specific files aren't separated into different folders or packs, then 
you use reasonable naming conventions. And extensions. You don't need 
meta-data to identify a shader; you *know* it's a shader.

Also, if you need to do some asset search, like "find all of the 
textures with property X", you could just have an SQLite database or 
something that contains this data. No need to hijack a media container 
format for it.