Game Engine Architecture

259 This system gives the programmers a great deal of fl exibility in defi n- ing all sorts of confi guration data—from simple B ...

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261 6 Resources and the File System G ames are by nature multimedia experiences. A game engine therefore needs to be capable of ...

262 6. Resources and the File System cess to a variety of removable and non-removable media, from memory sticks to optional hard ...

6.1. File System 263 6.1.1.1. Differences Across Operating Systems Each operating system introduces slight variations on this ge ...

264 6. Resources and the File System reserved escape character. For example, fi le and directory names may contain spaces under ...

265 z \game\assets\animation\walk.anim (current working volume) z \\joe-dell\Shared_Files\Images\foo.jpg (network path) UNIX z / ...

266 6. Resources and the File System back and forth between absolute and relative paths, and so on. It can be ex- tremely helpfu ...

267 and WriteFile() read and write data, respectively, and CloseFile() closes an open fi le handle. The advantage to using low-l ...

268 6. Resources and the File System fi les on a network (e.g., remote fi les managed by Xbox Live or PSN ), and also with fi le ...

269 6.1.3. Asynchronous File I/O Streaming refers to the act of loading data in the background while the main program continues ...

270 6. Resources and the File System // This function requests an I/O read, then // returns immediately (non-blocking). g_hReque ...

271 AsyncRequestHandle hRequest = ASYNC_INVALID_HANDLE; AsyncFileHandle hFile = asyncOpen( "C:\\testfile.bin"); if (hFile) { // ...

272 6. Resources and the File System 6.1.3.1. Priorities It’s important to remember that fi le I/O is a real-time system, subjec ...

273 manages the resources at runtime, ensuring that they are loaded into memory in advance of being needed by the game and makin ...

274 6. Resources and the File System sizes. Some teams simply “take their lumps” and allow their revision control tool to copy a ...

275 Clearly for any game of respectable size, we simply cannot rely on the memories of our developers in this manner. For one th ...

276 6. Resources and the File System know in which levels a particular animation is used or which textures are referenced by a s ...

277 UnrealEd. This means that the person who created the asset gets immediate feedback as to whether his or her asset is confi g ...

278 6. Resources and the File System source to its new name/location. The problem with these dummy remapping objects is that the ...