Ari Johnson schreef: > On 2/6/07, Giel van Schijndel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> On Tue, 6 Feb 2007 10:49:03 -0500, Ari Johnson wrote: >>> ... >>> >>> Now would also be a good time to consider changing to an XML file >>> format for all our data. That would make life easier. But >>> regardless, if anyone changes any file format, make certain to >>> endianize when you save and when you load. It's so much easier to >>> take care of the endianness issues when you are writing new code than >>> to have someone else do it months later. :) >> As far as save games are considered you basically have a big pro and big >> con for XML. >> Firstly XML would obviously be the easiest to read/write and operate on >> (i.e. with an appropriate parser). >> Secondly however, XML wouldn't be near as fast as any binary format >> would be (just grab data from a file and dump it somewhere in memory), >> XML might have O(n) here where n=number of objects >> (buildings/droids/etc). >> >> I'm not sure about my quantification of the performance hit though >> (because O(n) seems a lot in an RTS game). > It was my belief that the game reads things into memory once, when you > load a game or start a new level of a game, and thereafter only > accesses the data from memory. If that is incorrect, then you are > right - XML is a bad idea for efficiency reasons. However, if I am > correct, then the extra fraction of a second it takes to parse an XML > data file versus that for a raw memory dump will likely not even be > noticed. > > Mostly, I am just frustrated with evntsave.c and the related code in > scriptobj.c. It is extremely difficult to figure out what needs to be > endianized in those files because they are so haphazard compared to, > for instance, the map loading. AFAIK you are correct with the assumption that it loads the data in to memory only once. I was just taking the loading time into consideration which _will_ increase. Whether the increase will be acceptable/negligible or not will probably depend mostly on the XML implementation and the complexity of the storage format. Anyway I do agree that XML will (if it doesn't increase loading time with a factor 1.5 or so) probably be a good solution here.
-- Giel
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