Ugh let's not get into the file format arguments again. I couldn't care less if OpenXcom saved in text, binary or maple syrup. I've seen games that load/save from text files with
dozens of MBs in a matter of seconds, and I've seen games taking half an hour loading binary. I've seen formats made out of just memcpy'ing the whole game or out of ZIP files containing mixes of XML and binary files. It's all about meeting its needs.
My stance is this: Binary is all well and good when you have a solid structure and a fixed set of requirements, which is not the case with pre-v1.0 OpenXcom. The code is ever-changing and ever-developing, and binary would just make it a nightmare to maintain, while YAML lets us throw in and remove stuff with little care. After 1.0 we can look into all the optimization and perfomance needs and come up with the best possible format ever if necessary. If you wanna do that for us be our guest. As for endianness,
SDL has you covered.
For now I think it's OK to at least have "loading..." and "saving..." indicators as most games do.
