In focus: codecs as loaders and savers

As you will learn later this week, I've changed the R3 schedule to focus on a few layers below the GUI.

With Modules now available for testing, I want to get some of the main image loaders back into R3.

Of course, it's not a matter of just throwing them into the soup like we did on R2. In R3, image loaders are just a thin layer on top of decoders and encoders, codecs.

The soon to be released decode and encode functions are mezzanines that scan part of the system object for matching codecs, then evaluate accordingly.

It's not fancy, but it is useful. It's also more than just the primary R2 image loaders/savers; you will be able to provide your own plugins for any other formats you need. Got TIFF?

I decided that it was worth implementing the codec plugin concept first, as a step toward the more powerful R3 plugin components. We can work out some of the related issues easier this way.

Also, the bigger part of the task is to port the R2 resident decoders over to R3. In addition, I'd like to add-in UTF-16 and UTF-32 codecs, just so we have them done, and maybe some wave sound codecs, although I will admit we are seriously lacking any codebase for all variations of those (MIT, BSD, or any free/non-GPL implementations.) If you have ideas, post them.

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