Re: Fragmentation was RE: [GD-General] Compile times

[Josiah M. <jm...@ma...>]

<snip>

> > http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/wilson/papers/fragsolved.pdf
>
> Okay, went back and browsed that paper, and I don't think it applies.
> The datasets and object sizes they are looking at aren't representative
> of what I consider to be normal game. For example, they make the
> observation that most programs average allocating objects of about 6-7
> different sizes.  Any game that loads models, textures or sound will
> almost definitely not fit into this area.
>
> And they don't take into account run times of weeks or months.

If you are going to need a runtime of weeks or months, then chances are that
you are running a server. A server won't need to ever load models, textures
or sound. I know that often games such as quake will have a server that run
alongside of a graphical client, but those servers are only going to be up
for one game session, so they don't really count for the same reason that
the typical game run by a typical user doesn't count in terms of
fragmentation.

There are only so many hours that a person is going to play in a stretch.
And, as you already mentioned, games can often "cheat" by purging level
data.