Original Post
Hello all, I am in the process of designing a new model format for my own personal engine (although the fact that it is for models doesn't really matter). In the past, I've worked for a few game companies and everyone seems to have their own methods. One of the best I've come across was loading compressed files into a temporary memory buffer, allocating space for the decompressed data, then decompressing and directly using the data. The file format used a relocation table in order to fixup internal data to be pointers into itself, so it could be used as-is. When the model was no longer needed, only a single free was necessary to remove the entire model heirarchy tree, vertex data, etc. Plus, the data was compressed, and read all at once, so slow media reads were minimized. This is all well and fine if you have 32-bit pointers (they were using unsigned longs for relocation space), but if I decide to support 64-bit Windows natively, my pointers aren't going to fit anymore. Besides, VC gives lots of warnings for casting stuff between void * and u32... I could increase the space in the file to 64-bit, but it seems overkill -- especially if the file format is cross-platform, and I don't see any console using 64-bit pointers in the near future. :/ So basically what I'd like to know is, how do you guys do it? Do your formats still live in a 32-bit world, or is there some other neat trick that I'm not aware of yet? :)
