some thoughts on features

hi, i'm just thinking aloud some features that can really make plsm a great software:

- instead of throwing out thousands of files for big terrain, what about retrieving chunks from a single big file via a pointer? raw file access can really have performance impacts and maintenance is always a pain when windows does all the behind-scene-caching of file indexes...

- a configuration dialogue/"center" concept to generate .gen.cfg and .cfg for each terrain, providing a one-stop service to users rather than letting them dig into the text based files

cheers

Prior to 1. you have to make a specialiwed reader that open data file without loading it entirely in memory. Very hard to do on standard image file. so it goes to Raw file only. and then it's still hard.

2. Mapeditor is supposed to do that at the end of the end. Patch or new cegui application welcome.

1. not that i know exactly how to do it, i had the experience of using terrex's paging framework and they started off doing the tons-of-files method by subsequently upgraded to a single large file and paging chunks out of it dynamically.. somehow.

2. ...

1. terrex is database centric. not very well suited for games (database takes lot of memoery and CPU, specially if you wnat to support deformation.)
What's the problem with many files ? you can stil zip the whole map if you want.