As a last minute hack I've set up a routine that looks at all the assets that are loaded at game startup (except for geometry data & textures) and dumps that data out to a file. The file can then be used to load all the assets in a single pass, which cuts about 6 seconds off our load time[0]. The implementation is ugly, but it's compartmentalized and it'll do nicely until after E3.
I think I've fixed the last major bug in the movie player and it played a looped movie off DVD for about 10 hours without a crash[1]. The performance could use a little tweaking, but overall it's in a good shape.
So, now I'm waiting for a solid build, and then I'm on call for the rest of the weekend. Our publisher has decided that they'd rather have a couple extra days to test the build than a couple extra days to add new features. So, with a whole lot of luck I'll actually get tomorrow off.
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[0] Reduced load time is almost entirely due to reduced seeking. And yes, it's a bad sign when you have load times that can be reduced by 6 seconds.
[1] The last crash seems to have been caused by a race condition where a callback triggered a read request as the movie player was either shutting down or starting up.
Posted by matt at May 8, 2004 03:58 PM*poke poke* Did you survive? How was volunteering? How was the rest? Share...
Posted by: Naomi at May 24, 2004 07:30 AM