Who told you that what you believe to be true must be true! It is not true.
Firstly, the jerkiness you experience must be related to mouse pointer update rate and image update rate mismatch. If a character is involved then that burp is related to time of character generation stopping your character from smoothly advancing at the expected rate. Once the characters are generated you shall never feel that jerk even if you exit and re-enter the abbey hundreds of times.
Only I do experience it again when I move from section to section. It has nothing to do with the mouse. What did yuo mean by this? I realise there is a jerk as random stats are appied to objects and creatures, but they are almost undetectable. I mean pauses that last a quarter to half a second.
One serious cause of jerkiness is the loading of wave files from media on demand, such as that monolog you say on entering the abbey for the first time calling it a creepy place.
That is to be expected. And that's why I want the sound files on my hard-drive.
Everything the program needs within a world MUST be in RAM.
Wrong. Everything you can see and hear must be in RAM. The rest can be omitted until it is required.
Says who, YOU? If it is not in RAM then the programmer made a mistake he regrets right now reading your sad words. Everything within a world needed by that world is absolutely
REQUIRED.
When would be that
UNTIL, when you need to see it and oops we have to load it and your game JERKS? Give me a break. I am not telling you what the geniuses do here and there; I am telling you what we teach in the University for the want-to-be-programmers.
Emphasis on
can. It is not a requirement. In the
strictest sense, you only require your immediate surroundings in RAM. Look at
Dungeon Siege. It is one entire seemless world. Is that all loaded into RAM when you start the game?
Even the conversations are in RAM.
Again, only as required.
You misunderstood my quote, as I pointed to the conversations archive that you seem to have never read.
It is on the page right before your commented status.
Sorry, my mistake. I took that as the spoken conversation.
You are right that data-stream rates are fine, but access time between the two is a great difference and was my point from the beginning. To access a file on a disc takes about 3 or 4 seconds. To access the same file on a hard drive is almost instantanious.
And that is why we taught our students that critical data must be RAM Resident.
Your pseudo-instantaneous does not measure up to multiples of the speed of light which is not instantaneous either. So loading time must be eliminated altogether because execution time is quite a burden by itself.
Now, did you understand?
I said
almost instantanious. I do understand the principals (spelling?) of inertia and energy flow. Yes, I do understand and see your point. My opinion on the matter is that medai should be cached ahead of time, but still remain within memory size restrictions.
For someone so concerned about hard-drive space, you seem to have a lot of RAM to spare. That is another luxury many do not have.
Any time spent in loading and saving data is dead time in which the program is technically HALTED
Not necessarily. You can have hard-drive operations in the back-gorund. Windows does it all the time. Provided the code managing the data flow doesn't take CPU time away form the game processes, there is little trouble.
No game designer may gamble by keeping that data on a hard disk as quality tests shall disqualify the design instantly.
Yet that is one of the key components of almost every business database in the world.
Databases aren't stored in memory because they are too big.
So what is your freaking point, or did you even have a point at all, or are you just quibbling?
Aren’t we discussing real time performance of RPG games!
What does
BUSINESS applications have to do with our discussion sir?
My freaking point is that you seem to be saying that hard-drives are an inappropriate choice for storing excess data required during run-time. Swap files and real-time hard-drive access is used in most software applications, whether business or entertainment. Plenty of games use hard-drives effectively for storage of temporarily static components.
Hard disk space is not an issue for you but it is a very big issue for millions of computer based applications users.
And RAM for the rest of us.
Swapping (floppy) disks is definitely responsible for half the crazy people on this forum including me. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/biggrin.gif" alt="" />
I hate swapping discs too, but I don't mind it during installation if it means not having to do it agian.
Installation should never happen because there are systems that run from flash memory cards.
Which most computers do not support. When flash memory takes off, after DVD does, I'm sure software will be released on it and it will be better than ever.
Hell, let's just go back to cartridges. They're fast and have the storage of whatever modern ROM chips can provide.
This means that for now it is a step of technical advancement to load and run applications automatically with every possible plug and play automatic detection.
In the future, your DVD-RAM should be your bootable drive from which you may run your favourite or multiple operating systems.
So you put the Windows (or Linux or whatever) disc in, turn on the computer,
swap discs to load your application, and
swap discs again to get the datafiles you need to work/play.
I hated doing that on the Commodore Amiga 1000.
I think if you can have all of your favourite applications on the hard-drive, it takes away the need to ever swap discs for any application ever. If a reliable alternative to CD-Key can be invented, it would be a disc free system. Hell, you could download everything you ever needed off the Internet!
Take for example Play Station II and realise that a DVD application does exist in the manner I describe.
Good point. Aside from the OS is hard-coded into the machine, that is a near perfect hard-drive free game system. If they could somehow save save-games to the DVD, it would be even better.
Do you think that Play Station II is jerky in its performance because its games run from DVD or CD?
Good point. Although, I'm yet to see a Play Station game that has an entire world in one and not separate levels that take minutes to load. If you can point me at one, I'll have a look.
Sleep well! Stay bouncy!
