The Feb ‘05 edition of Game Developer Magazine had an article titled “Late-Binding Data” and described an extremely useful mechanism for automatically reloading data into a game engine dynamically when the data has been changed.  It detects when a file has been updated and repopulates the data throughout the system.  So, an image/model can be exported from some other program and the results will be immediately visible in the game. No reloading!

This sounds like a huge time saver in the long run, but right now its turning into a significant time sink.  I figure if this functionality would be useful in my personal project, it would likely be valuable to others as well, so I’m going to try to integrate it into Ogre.  Should also prove a useful exercise in using Ogre as well.