I can’t look into the code (because of SourceForge’s stupidity), but the idea sounds neat.
There are a few SVG to raster converters, but most of them are buggy or only for a specific OS.
Your app depends on Qt and Inkscape, which doesn’t make it suitable for everybody, but it brings up an idea:
How about having a native SVG renderer integrated in Panda? You would load your SVG textures same way as usual textures only with a size parameter that defines the pixel-size of the result, which will be loaded and mapped onto an object.
This sounds quite complicated, but in real it would bring two big features:
[color=green]+ very small texture file sizes independent of the actually rendered textures’ size
- textures virtually available in all sizes. you could even render at 4096² or more (only the graphics card or RAM limits you)
- all compression is lossless (other than e.g. JPG)
The price for these features is:
[color=darkred]- you’d have to create your textures as vector graphics, which in some cases might become more difficult than raster
- the rendering takes some time depeding on the complexity. means longer loading times (might be straightened out with short loading times of the SVGs from disk)
I once tried out a product of Allegorithmic (specialist in vector textures) which basically did this on runtime. It had a few modules for some game engines so that they can load their texture files (i guess something like extended SVG). According to what they say the idea works out very well.
Long story short: +1 for native SVG support.