Support of binary?

Questions
1

Hi,

Are the any support for exporting to a binary format?

Best regards,
NP

2

At the moment only by writing a custom export plugin in C++.

Edit (by @Ablu): See this thread for more information about plugins

3

Thanks for the quick replay bjorn.
I was just curious since iam working on a custom “converter” from TMX to bin right now.
So I make no unnecessary work, good :smile:

Have anyone done any form of benchmarks for existing parsers? (C/C++)

Best regards,
NP

4

Well there are many to choose from and at least currently performance is not the main thing you would want to compare them on, since it’s more about whether they are comfortable to use, support the needed features and/or are still maintained.

Of course a binary format is potentially much faster to load, but in general for a tile map there isn’t much XML to parse that it would make much of a difference I think. Of course on embedded devices or a low-end mobile phone it could be important to optimize the maps. But generally not so much because of the difference of XML or binary, but rather because you can filter and preprocess the file you write out to only contain what you need in an optimal format. This is also why a generic binary format does not exist.

If Tiled takes a long time to load a map, it’s usually because of having to load large or many tileset images.

5

You are absolutely right in what you say, I’m just curious to see the difference. Of course, the support of features and user friendly and still maintained are often higher priority then performance when looking for something.

It´s all about curiosity, i like to benchmark and learn. :slight_smile: