if you could pick a standard format for a purpose what would it be and why?

e.g. flac for lossless audio because…

(yes you can add new categories)

summary:

  1. photos .jxl
  2. open domain image data .exr
  3. videos .av1
  4. lossless audio .flac
  5. lossy audio .opus
  6. subtitles srt/ass
  7. fonts .otf
  8. container mkv (doesnt contain .jxl)
  9. plain text utf-8 (many also say markup but disagree on the implementation)
  10. documents .odt
  11. archive files (this one is causing a bloodbath so i picked randomly) .tar.zst
  12. configuration files toml
  13. typesetting typst
  14. interchange format .ora
  15. models .gltf / .glb
  16. daw session files .dawproject
  17. otdr measurement results .xml
  • @tal
    link
    19 months ago

    game engine

    So, you were refuting the “supported everywhere” bit. I’m not going to argue with that.

    But I will point out that there is a difference between a format that is good for interchange and a format that is good for a game to internally use for rapid loading. I mean, games store things in a lot of ways that you wouldn’t want to use for interchange. Games will have textures compressed in texture formats that can be sent straight to the video card, but are relatively space-inefficient; you’d want to use PNG or JPEG or something like that for interchange. You’ll often use ZIP to bundle multiple files together; it’s not necessarily because it’s an ideal archive format, but because it provides indexed access to individual archive elements. Many games use WAV or other uncompressed audio formats that are cheap to load but not terribly space-efficient.