If you have run through the above modelling tutorial, you now have a Verse server with some nice geometry and other contents in it. What if you wanted to turn off the computer, thereby stopping the Verse server? Your gorgeous content would be lost. This tutorial describes how to use the Saver and Loader tools to save out the contents of the server into a file, which you can then re-load later.
The Saver and Loader tools are included in the Uni-Verse distribution. They are command-line programs, which means they do not have a mouse-driven interface. Instead, you need to access them through whatever command line interface your chosen operating system makes available. For Linux and Mac OS X, this just means you need to open a standard Terminal. For Windows, select Run from the Start menu, type "cmd" in the dialog, and press Return. More information is available in the README for the tools.
The files that are written and read by the Saver and Loader tools are in a format called VML ("Verse modelling language"). This is a text-based XML format. You can read more about VML on the Verse web site. Successfully saving and loading the contents of a server does not require you to understand, or even look at, the contents of any VML files.
Saving
To save the contents of the server, which we will assume is runing on a machine whose Internet address is "localhost", use a command like this:
saver -a localhost -1 -i 30 -f cube.vmlThis will connect to a server on localhost (the -a option), save only once and then exit (the -1 option), wait 30 seconds before saving (the -i 30 option), and write the data to a file called "cube.vml" (the -f cube.vml option).
The resulting file, cube.vml, is just a regular text file. You can back it up, compress it, send it through e-mail, print it out, and so on.
Loading
To load a VML file back into a server, you use the Loader tool. Like the Saver, it is a command line tool. To load the contents of the cube.vml file created above back into a server, running on a computer whose address is verse.example.net, use it like this:
loader -ip=verse.example.net cube.vmlNotice how the server address is specified using a different-looking option. You are not limited to just a single VML file name, you can list any number of files and they will all be loaded, one after the other.
Also note that loading data into a Verse server does not replace what is already there. Instead, the new data is simply added.
Sample VML Files
If you are running the tools from a binary release download, you will have received some VML example files. In Windows, you can even upload a sample scene to a server running on localhost directly from the Start menu. These files are also available in CVS, in the vml module's scenes/ directory. Clicking on a revision number gets you to a page with a download link, you do not need to actually check out the files from CVS yourself.