Re: [opendemo-devel] zlib problems

[Dr. U. G. <Uwe...@ph...>]

Hello!

On Tue, Jan 22, 2002 at 12:27:46AM -0600, Conor Davis wrote:
> I've pretty much given up on getting zlib to work with qvm files, especially
> with the garbage return value bug. I started to do a bunch of hacks the
> stored return values in global variables, but that addresses the symptoms
> and not the problem. Anyway, in my testing I've found that the qvm maximum
> stack size seems to be 512K (after that quake3 crashes). I suspected that
> zlib was exceeding the maximum stack size, but with 512K it looks doubtful.
Enough is enough. Now I look in the created asm files  and learn this asm
language. It can't be more difficult than any other assembler language. After
that I'll write a tool calculate the maximum used stack frame.

> Instead of zlib, maybe we should use a binary XML format similar to wbxml?
Why not the unchanged wbxml? As far as I can remember, the Java code in
opendemo/tools/com/machinima/opendemo
contains a fully working xml text <-> wbxml converter. It was one of the first
things I did for OpenDemo. The only thing to correct it the tag string <-> code
table.

> It could even speed things up, since we could store numbers in binary
> instead of text.
No more strcmp(). Yeah! But the main point is, that we can use the already
existing XML framework and only have to switch the lowest layer: od_xml_read.c
or even better, we detect the file format by reading 1 byte. If it is '<', we
assume plain text XML, if it is not, it must be wbxml. But the zlib code should
stay there, at least for native code.

> I reduced the number of demo states from 16 to 1, which reduced the memory
> footprint from 11 megs to 3 megs. The file format is unchanged for now (I
> plan to mess with it soon).
Please do it soon. I intend to come up with a RtCW release shortly after the
SDK release for RtCW and we can't change the format too often afterwards.

Bye, Uwe