Limit Theory Forums

Thinking about mods, how easy would it be to import non procedural content into the same, such as textures or perhaps mocap data. How would they interact with the procedural parts of LT?

That's an interesting question. It gets at the strategy (yes, *strategy* ) for the overall architecture of LT as a game.

There's probably a line that will have to be walked of convenience vs. performance. Disk I/O is historically one of the slowest things a piece of software can do, so it's best reserved for actions that are not taken frequently.

Conversely, if something needs to be done frequently, you want to organize your code so that it minimizes trips to the disk for the information required to accomplish that action.

So what things might be exposed as files may depend on whether they need to be encoded in some LT-specific format that's good for performance but not directly readable by humans.

What are those things? That's the question.

This is actually a really interesting question. Theoretically, if you can read in data from disk using Lua, you ought to be able to read in just about anything, right? The question would be, how quickly can you do it? (As Flat said already). I'm mostly interested in seeing what people want to load in, though.