Re: [Algorithms] Complexity of new hardware

[Jarkko L. <al...@gm...>]

IMO, a fundamental problem with this is that it's difficult to guarantee
that all the data is converted to the new format. If there happens to be
some older data out of the reach of the data conversion and you remove the
conversion code, the data gets corrupted. Overall, I just think it's an
unnecessary maintenance burden for developers to take care of something as
mundane as the data conversion.

For the final build you obviously have all the data available, thus you can
update the data to the most recent version and strip off the type
information from the data. You probably want to process the data anyway to
linearize it for DVD streaming, swap the endianess, etc.


Cheers, Jarkko


-----Original Message-----
From: Adrian Bentley [mailto:ad...@gm...] 
Sent: Monday, April 20, 2009 3:08 AM
To: Game Development Algorithms
Subject: Re: [Algorithms] Complexity of new hardware

If you can break off a script by diffing two sets of type metadata is
that hard coded?  It would be unnecessary maintenance work, unless you
want to be able to change your data and can't do it within your
framework :P.  Maybe there's a way I haven't thought of.  Every time I
look at C# serialization, I've come up with a number of things I
wouldn't be able to do very easily (rename B, break A into 2 pieces,
etc.).

I certainly hadn't thought about it from a middleware perspective, but
all middleware needs a data upgrade path between versions.  Otherwise
you get stuck in time and become another point in favor of rolling
one's own tech.

Unless I'm missing something, you can't strip off all the class/type
information unless all your data is in the final format.  At that
point, you've solved your upgrade problem.  Linearly allocating
_definitely_ helps.  For some, though, even running simple
serialization code may not be fast enough.

Cheers,
Adrian