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MagicaVoxel is great! Even though the program is not open source, the file format is documented by the creator [0]. For a small game I'm working on I read in the vox files and reconstruct the meshes in-game. I can then create procedurally destructed variations by tweaking the vox data and re-generating the meshes in-game [1]

[0] https://github.com/ephtracy/voxel-model/blob/master/MagicaVo...

[1] https://twitter.com/MaxBize/status/1048717357319745538

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This is what every software should do. I don't care if software isn't free or open source, but file formats should be documented so that they can be read later or processed by other tools.

This is one of the reasons why I went with Arq for backups - it's a thing I tend to forget about, so if five years down the line the software turns out to no longer exist for whatever reason, I can be confident there's an open source unpacker somewhere.

I'd go a little further than "documented". MS Office's .docx and .pptx files are "documented" but creating a compatible reader is a major undertaking. I wish people would hold off until there's an existing open source project that can at least decode the files enough to accurately convert the files to another format. Avoid lock-in before has a chance to take root.

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