Re: XML was RE: [GD-General] RE: A portable preferences library

[Jorrit T. <Jor...@uz...>]

Alen Ladavac wrote:

>>The PlaneShift game (made with CS) has about 25 megabytes (uncompressed)
>>of XML files (aggregated
>>in four big files) of level data. On my Linux system at home (an Athlon
>>XP2000) the levels load
>>in about 16-20 seconds.
>>    
>>
>
>There is a mistake in your reasoning, isn't it? You say that we shouldn't look
>at the size of the uncompressed XML data. Then you start profiling how many
>uncompressed MB/s can you load. 
>
Well the engine IS loading uncompressed MB's. The decompression happens 
by another part
of the loader so when I'm talking about load time performance I'm 
talking about the time to parse
the UNCOMPRESSED file.

>You should look at the number of compressed
>MB/s. If running from harddisk, you should be loading between 5-20MB/s
>(depending on speed of the drive). Anything less than 5MB, and you are very
>CPU limited. And you should _never_ be CPU limited while loading. Not even
>close. If you are CPU limited on a 2GHz CPU, think about all the poor 700MHz
>Celeron users trying to load your game. There is no excuse for loading data at
>less speed than the media can stream.
>
Yes they are. You have to process the data. You have to send textures to 
the hardware (which is
something that you cannot do in load time). Note that binary dump of a 
structure is not possible
in our situation since Crystal Space is portable and has to run on 
various operating systems and
CPU architectures. So we cannot depend on binary data being compatible. 
That means there is
always SOME processing.

Greetings,

> Think about whether your users like to
>wait 20 seconds to load a level. If it could be loaded in 5, or even less...
>
>Can you get some more accurate profile?
>
>Alen
>
>
>
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