Re: [AD] Font loadin: Feature Request

[George Foot <gfoot@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Nov 30, 2001 at 10:20:04AM -0000, Vincent Penquerc'h wrote:
> > I didn't say loading the whole was a must (how would diablo 
> > work if you
> > needed 500Mb ram?), only that keeping less files is more efficient for
> > IO than several thousand 1Kb files in a single directory.
> 
> Sure, but my point was that it is quite difficult to split your
> data in several files while not duplicating data and still not
> load unnecessary data.

IMHO duplicating data is not a problem -- short load times are
far more important.  I wouldn't mind duplicating data on disk
for graphics, instances within leves, etc.  Ideally of course
your levels have individual textures, rather than sharing them,
but you tend to need an art crew for that. :)

In any case, though, seeking inside files isn't too expensive
(don't seek backwards in compressed files though, and for them
be aware that the loader probably needs to uncompress the file
on-the-fly while it seeks).  The big killer is opening and
closing lots of tiny files -- Windows in particular is really
poor at this.  So you could store all object meshes in one file,
and skip loading the ones you don't need; ideally you'd sort
them into some order and also load them in that order, to avoid
useless seeking (and especially backward seeks).  The loader
Shawn wrote for our current project is really good for this, and
we can load an entire level (real-world race track, loads of
textures and plenty of geometry) plus bikes, riders, physics
data, etc, in just a few seconds.  At the other end of the
scale, Half Life takes probably over a minute to load on my home
PC...

George