RE: [GD-General] Building pak/zip files

[Grills, J. <jg...@so...>]

One thing we've found is that if you can order the data files in the ZIP in
the same order as your game will load them (at least when that order is
known, like during application start up or level-based games), you can
significantly decrease the startup time of your application.  This assumes
your table-of-contents is preloaded so you don't have to seek to it between
files.  Unfortunately, I don't know of any tools to let you tweak ZIP files
in this manner, so we have our own format and tools.  Another advantage we
get with our own format is we may be able to duplicate data files within our
ZIP-like file in multiple places to further decrease load time by seeking to
the nearest one in the ZIP.  However, we haven't spent the time to write
nice GUI tools like WinZip, which I would really like.

I would also suggest supporting an arbitrary set of directories and ZIP
files to search.  That way you never need to make ZIP files during
development, and can release new ZIP files to patch data without
differential patching the original ZIP.

Jeff Grills
Star Wars Galaxies
Technical Director, Austin Studio
Sony Online Entertainment Inc.


-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Hook [mailto:bri...@py...]
Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2001 8:26 PM
To: gam...@li...
Subject: [GD-General] Building pak/zip files


I'm looking into a way to automate the build of our asset files, which
will probably just be in good old ZIP file format.  Currently I'm
storing everything in my EXE as a resource (don't ask), primarily
because I can change what I build into my EXE (e.g. for demo or full
versions) by a simple change of a resource symbol.

However, for obvious reasons I'd like to move to a ZIP file that stores
this information, and building one in a relatively error free way seems
like the way to go.  I'll likely rename the ZIP file just to avoid any
obvious tinkering, but otherwise I'm generally unconcerned by tweaking
of the assets.

The obvious thing to do is to run make with various parameters, e.g.
"make demo" or "make full" to build the various ZIPs.  Is this what
others are doing, or are any of you folks doing something spiffier?

Brian


_______________________________________________
Gamedevlists-general mailing list
Gam...@li...
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/gamedevlists-general