@belthazar, on Mar 9 2008, 04:04 PM, said in Meximum Resource Number:

It would make loading times somewhat shorter if the game just looked for all resource IDs between 128 and 640 and loaded whichever ones it found than it would take if the game counted up from 128 to infinity, only stopping when it had loaded 512 resources. That's what they call a While loop with no exit condition, and would cause your system to hang if there weren't 512 resources to load. Methinks option A is far superior, even if it makes the odd plugin maker confused that their 4w350m3 1337 0ü7f with ID 6969 just plain won't load.

Actually, to be fair, it's entirely possible to check if there aren't 512 resources before loading, preventing the hang; doing this is really fairly trivial, and actually, from what I know about resource programming, unless Matt is doing it in a particularly inefficient way, would probably be easier. The problem is not grabbing the first 512; the problem is that in doing so, there is no guarantee it will be the first 512; as a matter of fact, it probably wouldn't be. You see, only a fool would count from 128 up; the best way to load resources is to get the number and reference them by index, then get the ID number from that index. What the game (presumably) does is loop through all of them and check their ID number. If you wanted the 512 with the lowest IDs, it would need to make an array of them and then sort it...and then get the first 512. That's where the performance hit (and the annoyance factor) comes about.

Topics created by Claimh Solais