XML Files

[Syd Thrift]

A couple things about those:

1. I was looking through my PM history and I saw I had a conversation like a decade ago with a guy about the XML editor the beta team uses, why he chose PHP (ugh), and so on. Does that still exist?

2. I've made small forays into "creating" an editor (let's be honest, I mean "taking someone's existing XML editor and optimizing it for OOTP) and the biggest issue I have is that many of the files we have are just too large for these things to handle well. Like, schools.xml (which may be a not-great example because it's one of the few ones that would be hard to split off) is so large it even blows up Visual Studio Code when I open it up to find a college / high school.

So to part 2, I'd really, really love it if we could break apart english.xml in particular into several components:

- in-game play by play
- news reports
- player scouting reports

Ideally you'd want to break down the PBP into several files since that's probably 60% of the file in the first place. I understand that people have already edited the file as it exists now but I think you could pretty easily set up some kind of logic gate wherein if the sub-sections exist, you use them instead of english.xml, otherwise you use the big old file (and I'm pretty positive the game just loads the entire file into memory anyway so it's not like splitting them out into several files would be too huge of a deal).

World_default.xml could go similarly, perhaps with a US section, then a "Europe" section and so forth that might allow people to edit in, let's say, Europe as it existed in 1900 (not saying I am up for that! Just saying, that file is huge and clunky in its current iteration).