Some of you may be aware of my Voodoo Shader project and http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1152582-voodoogem/, designed to bring modern customizable shaders to Morrowind. As part of that project, I'm setting up a system where shaders can be attached to textures, allowing them to be used as materials. This allows a lot of new effects; simple things like metal or velvet, more complex effects like parallax and height mapping, all the way up to dynamic snow like Crysis and Skyrim use.

In order to make this happen, the shaders need attached to the textures somehow. In NWShader, I used material files to handle this. The concept is each mod or texture pack has a file listing textures, the shader to be used, and any settings.

What I'm trying to figure out now is the syntax for those. The current options are:

Simple XML form:

Simple curly form:

material "flat_texture.dds"{	effect = "bump.fx";	parameters	{		bump_texture = "bump_texture.dds";	}}

Since this system will be used most by artists, I'd like to get some feedback from you before going one way or the other.

I will be making simple tools, and potentially a Max plugin, to help handle this, but those all depend on which format is used. They also won't be out immediately, so there might be a short period where materials are written by hand.

Anyone have a preference between the above snippets?

I would favor the first one listed because its compact. If you happen to have a long list, this is helpful.

The second one looks like less typing even though it takes up more space

However the first one seems like an easier structure to follow - to be honest either one is going to be suitable - as long as you provide a template with an example that I can reuse I will be happy

I find the tag style a bit easier to deal with that the CSS style so i would vote for #1

And how goes it PK?