Game Engine Architecture

279 on the command line; to build a level, one types bl name-of-level. These com- mand-line tools query the database to determin ...

280 6. Resources and the File System resource types are granular enough that the team almost never has confl icts in which two u ...

281 within Maya itself. Worse, all of the metadata describing how a particular Maya fi le should be exported and processed must ...

282 6. Resources and the File System this is the case, we can pass the fi le directly to the next stage of the pipe- line. Reso ...

283 are relatively rare, it may be bett er to just bite the bullet and reprocess all the fi les when format changes do occur. Ev ...

284 6. Resources and the File System z Permits custom processing to be performed on a resource aft er it has been loaded, on a p ...

285 The primary benefi t of this approach is improved load times. When loading data from fi les, the three biggest costs are see ...

286 6. Resources and the File System Unreal Engine 3 takes a similar approach, with a few important diff er- ences. In Unreal, a ...

287 anteed to be unique across the entire game, because the operating system al- ready guarantees that no two fi les will have t ...

288 6. Resources and the File System rate, or even a multi-second freeze. For this reason, engines tend to take one of two alter ...

289 z Some resources like background music, ambient sound eff ects, or full- screen movies are streamed “live” as they play. The ...

290 6. Resources and the File System code. Most other resources can reside in main RAM, but diff erent kinds of resources might ...

291 Stack-Based Resource Allocation A stack allocator does not suff er from fragmentation problems, because mem- ory is allocate ...

292 6. Resources and the File System A double-ended stack allocator can be used to augment this approach. Two stacks are defi ne ...

293 rently. For example, when level A is loaded, it might allocate and make use of N chunks. Later, level B might allocate an ad ...

294 6. Resources and the File System Resource Chunk Allocators One way to limit the eff ects of wasted chunk memory is to set up ...

295 another section might contain debugging information. This debug data could be loaded when running the game in debug mode, bu ...

296 6. Resources and the File System We sometimes use the term composite resource to describe a self-suffi cient cluster of inte ...

297 of objects into a binary fi le, we need to visit each object once (and only once) in an arbitrary order and write each objec ...

298 6. Resources and the File System U8* ConvertOffsetToPointer(U32 objectOffset, U8* pAddressOfFileImage) { U8* pObject = pAddr ...