Re: Progress Update

[Christian Reiniger <warewolf@mayn.de>]

Pierre Phaneuf wrote:

>> The one and almost only point (so far) of PenguinFile is to provide for fast
>> and effecient file handling (convinience is the other goal). The opening of
>> files is *the* area in which really substantial gains can be made, while
>> still keeping things quite simple. Thus, this is quite an important thing.
>
>Opening of the files? Heck, in Quadra, there is about *10* such file
>opens over all the course of a typical short game, which includes
>reading the configuration (once), reading the highscore file (once),
>loading the resources (once) and loading the highscoring demos (when you
>click on the button).
>
>Per frame, we have an average of zero file opening. Okay, so how would
>you rate the investment in time now for a game such as Quadra?

Zero.

But you have to admit that Quadra is a *very* simple game concerning level
data. With "big" games the situation is completely different. Rainbow Six
for example has >>1000 files, most ranging from 150 Bytes to, say 50k.
XCom Apocalypse was similar, but the sizes were more like 1k - 5k.
Some time ago Dan Kegel (from Activision) told us that they regularly
reloaded stuff during gameplay in Mechwarrior 2.
CivCTP has 709 "freestanding" files plus at least 11 archives (together
accounting for 238MB of the 360MB installed size) containing more.
All other "big" games I have currently installed have all their game data
in big archive files.

File opening is relatively simple to speed up, and the speed differences
are tremendous.

>> We also plan things like dynamic on-demand disk-caching of slower medias
>> like CD-ROMs or DVDs and transparent memory mapping of files. This is still
>> a bit far off right now though.
>
>This is better stuff (the CD-ROM caching).

But more difficult to do properly (and doing it bad easily leads to either
a usability nightmare or to performance *degradation*).


	Christian
-- 

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