Loading level data at runtime

Divide the world in zones, keep in memory the current and adjacent zones. Use a background thread to load them.

In other words, asynchronous loading. Frankly, I''d like to see asnychronous loading in all games.

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Thanks to Kylotan for the idea!

if you build the bsp/octree/quadtree, whatever and the save that to a file you shouldn''t spend too much time loading it back into an tree in memory

couldn''t you just take the whole file and dump it into memory and refer to your root node from the start of the file?

I''m just a bit disappointed that people have come to accept load times as inevitable and smooth transitions to be out of the ordinary. These programmers can handle all these 3D mathematics and advanced data-structures and multi-language programming etc, yet they can''t get their data to load progressively rather than in one big lump. Sad.

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Async I/O didn''t work on Win95 (*cough* kludge on top of DOS *cough*), so I think a lot of people held off putting it in their engines. For file access many companies are using OLD code (if aint broke...) - even ours is still based on some stuff I wrote in 1998 when Win95 support still mattered.

Now MS have dropped Win95 support from DirectX it might persuade a few people to give their I/O a spring clean... I''m intending on doing it to ours at some point soon [though I''m mainly working on console stuff at the mo where I have guaranteed async i/o even from DVD].

Getting async access working well in general multi-developer situations can be tricky at times without a lot of discipline - i.e. people using data before its finished loading or people putting in wait loops which essentially turn it back into synchronous i/o (I''ve seen both in the past) etc.

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Simon O''Connor
Creative Asylum Ltd
www.creative-asylum.com