VACP

Part of my offline processing tools for the engine is vacp. Awkward abbreviation, I know. It stands for Vortex Asset Conditioning Pipeline. It's job is to process content (aka assets) to be consumed by the engine, so that they need little to no further processing at runtime by the engine.
When processed by vacp, each asset is first exported using a particular content exporter, and the output from this stage is fed to the content compiler, which in turn produces the engine-ready file.
When vacp is first invoked, it first registers the exporters and compilers has available by scanning libraries in a predefined plugin folder. This enables a developer to, for example, write a PNG exporter to allow the use of PNGs as textures in the engine, or write their own implementation of a content compiler more suitable for their needs.

Right now, I've just semi-finished a BMP exporter and a DDS (DirectDraw Surface) compiler. This means that bitmaps can be fed into vacp, and it will output a dds file (provided that the asset in question is set up to use this exporter and compiler, that is)... its pretty neat, but it is also the only thing vacp can do at the moment :) I'll post more on that subject tomorrow!