Because storing arbitrary data as a string was not good:
- It *never* followed alignment requirements due to the last byte being
used for size. Instead the size is now stored before the data, and
thus the data is always on the 64 byte boundary.
- As it could contain arbitrary binary data, it could cause
magnum-sceneconverter --material-info to print garbage, corrupt the
terminal or, worst case, crash. Not good.
- It stored an implicit \0, which was unnecessary.
It was quite a pile, and all of it was written just once, relying only
on hopefully-available model files that would hopefully touch most code
paths. Which means, extremely annoying to make changes in.
I extracted the code to a header that can be tested with a mocked-up
importer and without having to execute the utility itself, deduplicated
the image info printing code, fixed various inconsistencies (such as
data/field flags sometimes denoted with superfluous "flags:" and
sometimes not) and TODOs (such as 2D/3D skins, where there was no format
whatsoever that would have 2D skin support, so the code couldn't get
written).
Now it's finally possible to easily add the remaining missing features,
such as printing camera info.
Vladimír Vondruš