XML downside

[muxec]

Another stupid idea... Shared libraries for effect functions. See my thread in programming for details.

[Ablaze]

XML can be interpreted by the program any number of different ways and I’m not sure exactly how freeorion does it, but most programs I know of use tinyXML which does a very good job. It converts the entire document into a tree of XML elements and portions of that tree can be passed around. So you can have a function like this:

bool loadPlanet(TiXmlElement planetData);

and have a loadSystem function that calls loadPlanet for every planet element, ad nauseam.