Materials in XML

After spending some time working on the XML format for the material system, I have arrived at quite a different format than I had originally envisioned. Even so, after the third or fourth revision I feel fairly comfortable with it and it seems pretty intuitive to put together.

I have also been thinking about the term 'material' and I think SimmerD was right - it doesn't really fit completely in this context. The reason being that my materials actually define the shaders as well, which allow for geometry manipulations. I think the standard term 'material' typically refers to something like a BRDF. Even so, I can't think of a better term to use so the current implementation is a "CMaterialDX9".

Once the XML file loader is complete, then I can begin to formalize several material types. It has been a long, long time that I have been manually loading each of the parameters and textures and views for each object - finally having a unified and standard material definition (data driven nonetheless) will be a great improvement in efficiency.