No, not at all. But by putting every asset a level (for example) needs in the same file, you can pretty much guarantee you can read it all sequentially without additional seeks.
That does force you to duplicate some assets a lot. It's also more important the slower your seeks are. This technique is perfect for disc media, since it has a fixed physical size (so wasting space on it is irrelevant) and slow seeks.
> by putting every asset a level (for example) needs in the same file, you can pretty much guarantee you can read it all sequentially
I'd love to see it analysed. Specifically, the average number of nonseq jumps vs overall size of the level. I'm sure you could avoid jumps within megabytes. But if someone ever got closer to filling up the disk in the past, the chances of contiguous gigabytes are much lower. This paper effectively says that if you have long files, there's almost guaranteed gaps https://dfrws.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/2021_APAC_paper... so at that point, you may be better off preallocating the individual does where eating the cost of switching between them.
From that paper, table 4, large files had an average # of fragments around 100, but a median of 4 fragments. A handful of fragments for a 1 GB level file is probably a lot less seeking than reading 1 GB of data out of a 20 GB aggregated asset database.
But it also depends on how the assets are organized, you can probably group the level specific assets into a sequential section, and maybe shared assets could be somewhat grouped so related assets are sequential.
Sure. I’ve seen people that do packaging for games measure various techniques for hard disks typical of the time, maybe a decade ago. It was definitely worth it then to duplicate some assets to avoid seeks.
Nowadays? No. Even those with hard disks will have lots more RAM and thus disk cache. And you are even guaranteed SSDs on consoles. I think in general no one tries this technique anymore.
Not 'full' de-fragmentation, Microsoft labs did a study and after 64MB slabs of contiguous files you don't gain much so they don't care about getting gigabytes fully defragmented.
It's an optimistic optimization so it doesn't really matter if the large blobs get broken up. The idea is that it's still better than 100k small files.
Not really. But when you write a large file at once (like with an installer), you'll tend to get a good amount of sequential allocation (unless your free space is highly fragmented). If you load that large file sequentially, you benefit from drive read ahead and OS read ahead --- when the file is fragmented, the OS will issue speculative reads for the next fragment automatically and hide some of the latency.
If you break it up into smaller files, those are likely to be allocated all over the disk; plus you'll have delays on reading because windows defender makes opening files slow. If you have a single large file that contains all resources, even if that file is mostly sequential, there will be sections that you don't need, and read ahead cache may work against you, as it will tend to read things you don't need.
I assume asset reads nowadays are much heavier than 4 kB though, specially if assets meant to be loaded together are bundled together in one file. So games now should be spending less time seeking relative to their total read size. Combined with HDD caches and parallel reads, this practice of duplicating over 100 GBs across bundles is most likely a cargo-cult by now.
Which makes me think: Has there been any advances in disk scheduling in the last decade?
Their concern was that one person in a squad loading on HDD could slow down the level loading for all players in a squad, even if they used a SSD, so they used a very normal and time-tested optimisation technique to prevent that.
In fact, the web browser may be the best example of a program antithetical to the unix philosophy. It is a single program that does rendering, password management, video decoding, dev tools, notifications, extension systems, etc. Adding some new AI component is rather on-brand for browsers (whether a good decision or not).
I don't want my web browser to be a mediocre PDF reader. I want my good and perfected PDF reader to be a PDF reader. I don't want my web browser to be a Web development IDE. I want a specialised (version of) a browser with all the developer tools and one that lacks all these features is lighter, safer and simpler for browsing.
I don't want an FTP client in my web browser (I don't want one anywere lol). Firefox was extracted from Mozilla back in the days exactly because Mozilla had become a browser that was bloated and crammed full of features that were unpolished or just subpar.
Firefox saved Mozilla and fought back by being lean, fast, and terribly focused at doing one thing and doing talhat well.
I want a browser that's good and forever improving in letting me browse the web and run and use web-apps.
Fair enough, but this isn't that case. They have Y (it's in the first photo) and tested a previous version of the model. The changes are predictable (rotating letters and slight scaling) so I don't think it's unreasonable to be confident and not waste plastic.
However, I'm happy it's happening because you don't need an LLM to use the protocol.
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