Game Development Patterns and Best Practices

Archetype files

The first thing we need to do is look at how we define our object archetype within a file. The Mach5 Engine uses .ini files for archetypes, levels, and anything related to initialization of the engine. A more standard file format would be XML or JSON if you wanted to keep them as human readable and modifiable. If you didn't want them to be modified by users, the files could always be saved as binary.

We have chosen .ini files because they are easy to read by both humans and a computer program. They only have a few simple rules, so they are easy to explain in just a few sentences. They only contain named sections which are defined by square brackets [ ], and key value pairs in the form of key = value. The only exception is ...