A situation has come up repeatedly in my modding experience where it would be useful to find out the differences between two POF models. Mostly this is because we have two models that appear identical but which have different dockpoints, or different paths, or some sort of obscure modification to the POF data that none of the modders can remember.
I thought it might be cool to create a diff tool to compare the difference between two models, but there are already a number of very good diff tools available today, and it seems a shame to create a new one from scratch. Then I realized that if the POF were somehow converted to text format, one could simply run an existing diff tool on the text form of the POF.
So, is it possible for PCS2 or some other tool to do this? Can the PMF format, for example, be easily saved to XML form? XML would seem to be the best text format to use, as it most closely corresponds to the chunk tree layout of the existing binary object.
This would also allow the enterprising modder to tweak some aspect of the POF without having to load up the modelling program, in the same way that a mission can be tweaked in a text editor without loading it up in FRED. Of course, he would need to know what he's doing.
