Talk:REL (File Format)

Filled in at Runtime

I notice Leseratte's latest edit [1] documents the padding as runtime variables. In my experience there are quite a number of file formats with such runtime variables, but we don't make a habit of documenting them on this wiki. We tend just to list them as padding, documenting only the static behaviour of the file format. I think we should be consistent Wiki wide on this. Documenting the runtime behaviour is certainly more thorough, but not particularly useful to people writing editors for file formats who may not understand the distinction. I'd personally vote to not have any runtime variable documentation on file format pages. Chadderz (talk) 09:19, 23 December 2017 (UTC)

While these values are indeed empty in the file on-disc, they are not really just "padding". Padding, in my opinion, is a reserved value / block solely to align the following data to an x-byte border, bytes which are empty, will always be empty no matter what, and will never be read. If people are writing file format editors for such a complicated format like REL, they should be able to read basic english telling them "hey this is runtime-only". If you have a better idea on how to display these values, please tell me. But just because things haven't been documented in this wiki in the past is no reason not to document these now / in the future. -- Leseratte (talk) 10:43, 24 December 2017 (UTC)