This week we continued our work on the new OOB database format:
The information in the OOB database format we now have created has been completely separated from the representation in the game's code, in effect making it a generic format.
Our load code now transforms this into the specific data used by the engine and if the engine changes we need to change that code, but the information gathered in the OOB database can remain the same.
We felt this was needed since the OOB's are the result of historical research and thus represent some kind of "ground truth" and we don't want this effort to be wasted or require massive modifications if we change some detail inside the engine.
So we went the extra mile and separated the OOB format from the engine format and wrote a new loader for the engine. This separation will allow us to work on OOB's and engine features in parallel without them interfering with each other. This also means we can add more information to the OOB than the engine currently uses but might incorporate in the future.
In parallel we added more features to our OOB editing UI so we can create and edit OOB's a lot faster than before.