Re: Progress Update

[Pierre Phaneuf <pp@ludusdesign.com>]

Christian Reiniger wrote:

> 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.

Quadra isn't so simple, beware... It isn't a 3D first-person shooter,
no, but it uses plenty of resources, even during the game. Quake doesn't
reload anything duing game play, what does Mechwarrior reload exactly?

But the archive system used in Quadra is just as good as the one that
was used for Doom and its friend (the classical WAD system), and it
would only need about a day of improvement before it'd be ready to have
multiple thousands of files.

We already have a range of 300 bytes to 300k in Quadra, with 150 files
approximately. The low number of files is what let me use linked list,
so the exact improvement I would do would be to go to a hash table.

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

By the way, what are your general tricks to speed up file *opening* and
file handling in general?

> > > 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*).

Yes, of course. To me, PenguinFile doesn't sound like it would be an
earthshaking improvement over my own system, so I have no good reason to
switch. That would be a "problem" of PenguinFile. I will not leave the
tools and libraries I currently use, as I am well used to them and know
them inside out, without a *significant* improvement in performance.

Is PenguinFile better than what I think?

And where could I get the sources to PenguinPlay? The CVS server is
rather empty, isn't it? I would like to see the state of things a bit...

-- 
Pierre Phaneuf
http://ludusdesign.com/