Hey guys,

I was thinking about a new system for sprite info and icons.

Instead of separating sprite icons from sprite data info, we will combine them!

This way, people can add icons easily. The code will be cleaner too!

Then, we could use a .xml file that will describe the positions and what icon for that sprite, and the sprite data.

For doing updates, we could have a separate .txt file with a version number in it. NSMBe could read the .txt file on the server, delete the old sprite stuff, and download the new ones.

To prevent conflicts, we will need the users to close any open editors or levels, and then start downloading.

If the sprite info is too big and takes too long to download, we could archive it in a file on the server, with a .txt file hanging out outside the archive. Then, when we do updates, we will check the text file. Then, we can download the archive, as well as the text file, unpack the archive, and replace the current sprite data. The text file will be stored somewhere with the sprite data.

I know that if we're going to do this, it's going to take quite a bit of setup and recoding on the server side (sprite data editing, creating a repository for the sprite data), as well as NSMBe (interpreting the xml files).

What do you think?

Yes, but:

Some sprites are just an image and can be easily encoded in an XML file.
But there are other sprites that are much complex to render, and that their rendering depends on the sprite data. For example, stuff that can change size or color or dunno what.
Take a look: http://code.google.com/p/nsmb-editor/source/browse/trunk/NSMBe4/NSMBSprite.cs. Do you want to recode all that in an xml file?

For those complex sprites, we could also use more custom tags. It's still possible.

Yea, it will take a while. We need a bigger engineering force in order to change to this system in a reasonable amount of time.

Changing to this system isn't really feasible now I guess.

yeah. There's no point in changing something that actually works.